After years or pushing to take some of the IPTV limelight away from market leader Alcatel, Ericsson has landed a deal replacing one of the aging OMP Alcatel middleware based systems installed at Telekom Austria in 2006, and run under the brand of aonDigital or aonTV.
The new Ericsson based service will allow access to TV content on all three screens through a special set top it calls a MediaBox which will allow movement of media files to the TV, mobile phones and any PC, the company said. Actually it said all that back in September in a financial press release and gave very little in the way of details of how it will achieve it. Ericsson says that it will swap out some kit, and add to the system so that it can talk to multiple devices, and that it will eliminate barriers between TV sets and PCs as well as introduce a new generation user interface.
So it hasn’t done all that yet, it has just won a contract by the sounds of it to start all that. There’s quite a lot of work left to be done here before Ericsson can finally have an IPTV reference site on its doorstep, which is not just an encoder customer from its Tandberg TV acquisition, recently renamed as Ericsson.
“We will offer new features like advanced graphical user interface, internet services over TV, latest video on demand and recording functions to our customers in Austria. This will enhance the user experience drastically and keep our leading position in the IPTV area,” says Walter Goldenits, CTO Telekom Austria TA AG.
Separately VoD specialist Edgeware said that it had won the VoD part of the contract. Last March Swedish VoD specialist Edgeware, which invented the idea of using cheap Flash memory based systems to serve video, announced it had a strategic alliance with Ericsson and that it would integrate its solid state VoD platform with Ericsson’s IPTV middleware system and its OpenStream Digital Services Platform.
So far at aonTV in Austria there are just 100,000 IPTV customers, installing at the glacial rate of around 20,000 a year, so the system clearly needed an upgrade with some more exciting features. Ericsson will be the lead integrator as well as supply OpenStream and its WatchPoint Content Management System.