Ericsson has at last assembled a coherent multiscreen package by adding delivery to video processing for MediaFirst, almost two years after announcing the first trials with selected operators at IBC 2014. Clearly Ericsson needed to get this right, given that MediaFirst is its next generation platform for IPTV, cable and OTT operators and needs to be much more flexible than Mediaroom.
In fact, while MediaFirst is regarded as the successor to the ageing Mediaroom it also incorporates key components of Ericsson’s other acquisitions over the years, from encoding elements dating back to the original TandbergTV purchase in 2007 to the adaptive bit rate streaming and other key multiscreen technologies gained with the Azuki Systems buy in February 2014.
Ericsson never really intended to evolve Mediaroom directly into a new version, since it had been stagnating too long under Microsoft’s ownership and had too much baggage from the early days of IPTV when the main objective was to make up for the shortcomings of broadband delivery networks. Microsoft had already moved on strategically to focus on OTT and its Xbox gaming platform and had done the minimum necessary to keep its Mediaroom customer base ticking over.
Ericsson’s acquisition was almost entirely to acquire the substantial customer base of mostly Tier 1 operators including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, SingTel of Singapore, Swisscom, Telus and Telefónica. Inevitably therefore Ericsson’s immediate pressing priority was damage limitation so that it could hang on to this customer base.
One of the jewels, BT, had already ditched Mediaroom and there were rumblings of discontent among some of the others. Mediaroom did at least have the virtue of stability, which made some of its customers reluctant to jump ship, so that in the event Swisscom has been the only major defection since Ericsson took over the platform, deciding instead to adopt an Android platform for TV and SoftAtHome’s software for its Internet-Box home gateway. Deutsche Telekom has built a system with Huawei’s help, around its existing Mediaroom system.
Ericsson managed to keep the rest on board by reviving Mediaroom temporarily as far as was possible – adding restart TV and improving content discovery, along with support for the HEVC codec. The latter extended the reach of the IPTV services further out across broadband infrastructures.
Ericsson has also weaned the platform away from Microsoft’s Win CE hardware platform so that it could run on the much more widely deployed ARM processors for emerging 4K set tops. The resulting extended platform was called Mediaroom Reach.
But Ericsson decided that in the long term Mediaroom was a dead end and would have to be retired. So it embarked on the delicate mission of persuading its major customers to migrate to the emerging MediaFirst platform which would converge IPTV with OTT and increasingly blur the distinction between managed and unmanaged IP networks. Such migration was necessary to enable faster deployment of new features and enable operators to allow freedom for their subscribers to connect whatever devices they wanted to access the service, in other words BYOD (Bring Your Own Devices).
This is where the Azuki acquisition came in, bringing the required multiscreen components including the User Interface, personalization, content protection and discovery, as well as the adaptive streaming and ability to reach all devices. Some of it, such as support for the principle pay TV platforms, was incorporated into Mediaroom Reach.
Ericsson then started the MediaFirst trials late in 2014 after completing the initial Azuki integration and then a year later announced the commercial version of the video processing part including encoding. This also included the software development environment designed to enable much faster deployment, based on the DevOps approach where development and operational teams are much more closely coupled to shorten time to bring out new features. The mantra is continuous innovation, which Ericsson has been talking a lot about in the context of MediaFirst, but then so have its competitors such as Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco.
Ericsson had learned from its Mediaroom specialists the importance of catering for unpredictable events when delivering over IP, even within the relatively walled garden of IPTV. For MediaFirst it has adopted the Everbridge IT Alerting System which was itself launched in May 2014. This distributes alerts both internally and in the last resort to customers.
The aim is to increase the chance of fixing problems before they affect customers by improving internal communications with response teams and bridging the gap between identification and resolution of problem. This includes security issues such as Denial of Service attacks, as well as network outages and congestion. It is supposed to identify the person with the required skills by email, phone, SMS or pager as appropriate. Then if any customers do suffer downtime or loss of quality, the system will alert them of the cause and estimated resolution time, issuing continual updates.
Even if this does not speed up problem resolution Ericsson has found that customers are more satisfied and less prone to churn if they are kept informed. This IT alerting was incorporated in the latest addition to MediaFirst, the delivery platform, unveiled at Broadcast Asia 2016 at the very end of May. Alongside the IT alerting Ericsson claims to have provided complete content visibility and control across the whole delivery chain. It incorporated the analytics technology acquired from Azuki and exploits Ericsson’s own CDN platform, its Unified Delivery Network (UDN) launched at Mobile World Congress 2016.
The UDN is really a turbo charged global CDN with the main differentiator being that it can provide end to end service and offer guaranteed QoS with the help of Telco partners, distributed across key markets around the globe. For the crucial last mile Ericsson has been putting in place revenue sharing arrangements with its broadband service provider partners, such as China Telecom, SingTel, Hutchison Global Communications, Telstra and Vodafone. The UDN then is pitched as a fully-managed global CDN service where Ericsson deploys equipment inside the operator’s last mile networks. Ericsson then manages the CDN and business operation including monetization, giving the network owner a revenue share. In the context of MediaFirst, UDN is an option for providing end to end managed transport as part of a customer’s delivery infrastructure.
Some of Ericsson’s UDN partners are also MediaFirst customers, such as Telstra, which was keen to exploit the flexible CDN capacity provided by the former. Other features included in the MediaFirst video delivery platform include Edge repackaging to HLS or DASH for connection to iOS, Android and set tops; Instant Channel Change for Live TV; common encryption and Multi-DRM support; Targeted ad insertion capabilities anywhere in the media delivery chain including mobile and set top clients; the video delivery analytics; mobile video optimization and support for sponsored data.
Ericsson also supports Multipath TCP, a standard still under development by the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) enabling TCP sessions to spread out across multiple paths for increased redundancy and also to increase bit rate over networks where bandwidth is constrained. Despite not being finally ratified, it has been deployed, most famously by Apple for its Siri voice recognition app on iPhones and iPads, where it improves QoS by minimizing impact of intermittent throughput over individual paths.
MediaFirst also supports Multicast ABR, which came out of CableLabs as part of the MSO IP migration strategy via DOCSIS 3.0, in effect replicating IPTV multicast for HFC networks almost a decade later. But multicast ABR can also work for OTT services by extending CDN-like capability into the home, rather as one or two vendors such as Broadpeak have done with proprietary techniques. The idea is that if more than one device is watching the same linear stream in a home they join the same ABR session to the gateway or set top. It helps operators transition to all IP, although for many Mediaroom customers it is about migrating from IPTV to a hybrid approach incorporating streaming, but still conserving bandwidth on the access network.