IPTV browser company Ant has been articulating a new strategy at NAB and since, which focuses on it trying to create a new standard which it calls Rich Media Access Interface, designed to offer consistency across multiple set tops for the modern IPTV operator.
Ant says it has around 70% of the IPTV set top browser market and already it claims that this new standard has strong backers at Cisco and Nagravision, and says the strategy will take Ant into embedded portable devices and handsets as well.
The way the current IPTV world is heading I would not want to be a set top maker, or at least not one that relies on differentiation rather than delivery price. The Ant strategy to us seems to want to take away all set top differentiation, and replace it with a uniform software layer that will incur a small increase in what you pay the browser supplier, rather than be part of the high expense the makes up customer premises equipment hardware in IPTV installations.
Ant CEO Simon Woodward explained, ‘We are making the RMAI interface available, and other browser or set top companies can write their own versions if they wish. We think we are building consensus and Cisco’s Scientific Atlanta and Nagravision’s Quative software have adopted it and assume it is in the design of set tops now.’
‘The problems all come when set top companies all use slightly varying Javascript extensions to integrate their set tops into an IPTV system. That means that every different type of set top used needs to be separately integrated into the middleware. The way in which a channel change is performed or an IGMP join, or when to flush a buffer, is all constructed in a proprietary manner and the middleware application has to be cognisant of all the details of the design.’
In essence RMAI is a C based application, which provides the kind of low level performance of C, and provides a Javascript API upwards to the application.
Ant will put the RMAI interface into its latest Galio client to work alongside its browser. This can be placed inside set tops, but also hand held media devices, PCs and handsets. That way an IPTV system can talk to any of those as if they were the same device.
Every pay TV operator has been dogged in the past by set top makers trying to lock operators into their set tops. Often DRM or conditional access systems have been given away so that cable operators can be locked into specific set top suppliers. Telcos would like to be able to go to virtually any set top maker, and force them to be price competitive, and if Ant convinces them, can put out an RFP which demands support the RMAI. Later Ant will push the interface to a standards body and try to get it properly endorsed as a standard, but right now it is looking for design wins that will bring it more market weight.
One example that Woodward gave of the usefulness and completeness of his Galio client was that it was aware of other clients that are attached to it. ‘If you are watching one TV program and recording another and you try to record a third program, most devices will have run out of tuners, but the Galio client might offload the job to another set top elsewhere in the house, which is connected to it. The Galio client also comes with various video accelerators and an SQL microdatabase to store EPG data so that it doesn’t have to be constantly resent.
So isn’t it like the Engineware software that saw Pace Microsystems get its set tops into Comcast in a record breaking $500 million deal, where it can emulate either Motorola or Scientific Atlanta or OCAP devices?
‘Well similar yes except that Engineware only works on Pace boxes, Galio client with RMAI might end up on all of our 70 licensees set top designs,’ said Woodward.
‘In the past the set top provider has been influential as an integration advisor in telco IPTV installations, but increasingly this role is falling to integrators like Accenture and Cisco. And they don’t want to support too many set top designs, so they can mandate RMAI on behalf of operators,’ said Woodward.
The big gap in this strategy for Ant is the number of tier one IPTV operators that have chosen the Microsoft IPTV system, which doesn’t even use a browser, but a CE based .Net client. ‘The Galio client could easily line up alongside the Microsoft architecture if an operator wanted to go that route, and we have a level of dialog with both Microsoft and AT&T.
‘It can take a prohibitive amount of time to introduce new services using dot Net because it is so complex, and when the consumer moves between different services on the Microsoft middleware they each have a different look and feel, as if they are from a different source,’ said Woodward.
‘There are few set top makers that engineer all of what we put into Galio directly into their set top, and although one or two set top companies may not like our strategy, most of them see it as adding something to what they are doing, not competing with them. Most of them cannot afford an investment of this type,’ he added.
Ant says that it will continue to pursue a strategy of building out applications on the set top, but when asked if Ant would actually write network server side applications, such as an entire middleware suite, Woodward said, ‘Never say never, but we have no plans to right now.’