Canadian IPTV specialist Espial has been busy and this week has claimed a win at Sweden’s Com Hem, the largest cable operator there, in a IPTV hybrid architecture where Espial has supplied middleware for VoD services.
We say it’s been busy because Espial began life as the browser supplier on Myrio’s IPTV efforts, which were acquired by Siemens, now part of Nokia Siemens and which has major installations at Belgacom, KPN and NTT in Japan.
Last year it told us that it had diversified into IPTV middleware on both set tops and servers, offering a multicast carousel, which delivers everything from the EPG, to advertising, to content search capabilities and customer support applications. But its VoD services were acquired in a panic when Kasenna investors got spooked by the state of the market and pushed for a cash-less buy out by Espial.
At the time it looked like two old timers in the IPTV market merging to keep their installed bases intact while the merged entity looked for some across the board credibility in a consolidating market. If you take a look at the Espial IPTV system architecture it now ticks virtually every box across the IPTV landscape except for encoders and conditional access, where it partners. Its revenues jumped by around 20% during the dark days of 2008, to just over $10 million, and are on track for $12 million this year, and it has around $8.7 million in the bank, but the company is still burning around $1 million a quarter.
The Com Hem deal will include interactive services, movies on demand, catch-up TV programs and a music on-demand service. Com Hem will be actively rolling out and marketing these services and says that by December they will pass 500,000 Swedish households. Com Hem’s previous cable systems offer triple play services to two million homes in Sweden so that’s a considerable chunk of these.
“Espial IPTV middleware provides us with a powerful, high performance platform to deliver a superior user experience and the possibility to rapidly add new innovative services. With it, we’ve developed and launched a range of on-demand and interactive TV services including VOD, Start-Over TV, Catch-Up TV, Landlord-Tenant management portals and other interactive services, based on a hybrid DVB & IP approach” said Martin Kull, Chief Technology Officer of Com Hem.
The main integrator for the Com Hem system was Ericsson which brought together and integrated multiple vendor offerings, including the Espial system, but it was highly likely that Ericsson subsidiary Tandberg provided encoders and the company said it used its OpenStream Digital Services Platform and its Edge QAM.