AssetHouse, a company that has emerged after over ten years working on British Telecom’s IPTV vision, is pursuing tier one Telcos across Europe with the message that it can get them out of their content management messes.
The company is offering an abstracted content management approach that separates presentation logic, from content data and allows IPTV offerings to be managed at the product level.
Right now the system’s best advert is that it is at the heart of the VoD hybrid BT Vision IPTV offering just launched in the UK. BT has always said that launching a full broadcast/multicast IPTV offering in the UK was foolhardy because of the popularity of Freeview, the digital terrestrial service that goes to around 11 million of the UK’s 24 million homes, using DVB-T digital transmission.
Instead BT wanted to create a huge VoD archive to sit alongside a Freeview set top, with a DVR and access to 5,000 films (it launched in December with only 1,000, but it is gradually adding more).
‘The key to VoD service is not to let it sit there and wait to be searched, but to present your content assets proactively by going out to the customer through the EPG, and grabbing their attention, and that’s the kind of toolset that AssetHouse gives BT,’ said Edward Roberts, Vice-President of Marketing for AssetHouse.
Roberts and Sandip Sarda, one of the founders and Senior VP Technology, Strategy & Strategic Alliances, went on to describe the AssetHouse applications, sitting as an integrated suite of Java written applications on an Oracle database running on Sun hardware.
As the diagram below shows, the content never enters the application, but instead content metadata, content identifiers, EPG data and the like are all filtered through it. The application splits into a single inventory, like a bill of materials, of all content assets, and then product data is kept in a separate database, where a product is a specific VoD offering. The service and despatch element ensure that vital steps like sizing of screens, and transcoding to different codecs has happened before allowing a piece of content to be released. That way the system can control each step, so publishing in a closed IPTV system, in a web TV format to a PC and to a mobile handset can all come from the same product database. The actual physical transformations are out on the network, but the control of them resides, through APIs, inside the applications, so that everything about a product can be arranged by the operator using a dashboard back end.
‘We have been working on this since 1996, when I worked inside BT, and we have been visiting potential tier 1 clients in IPTV for the past 5 years and have carried out consulting for many of them,’ said Sarda. ‘The key is to create the right database schema in the first place, and then you know you can control any element of VoD product management.’
‘If an operator wants to ingest content now, but make it available at Christmas, it can be done reliably, right away, with no further manual changes. If an operator wants to allow a second language on a film, or to go into the business of selling film sound tracks, it can be enabled as a digital product easily,’ he explained.
The software sits as the backbone to the BT Vision installation and has been integrated with the Microsoft MSTV middleware, Windows Media DRM, on content encoded on Thomson encoders, but the team is confident that it can also work with other middleware, and even sit within an IMS framework and offload work to and from an IMS server.
‘We haven’t got a customer yet which wants to offer an integrated mobile TV version of their IPTV, but we expect that to happen, and we can also work with those formats,’ said Roberts.
‘We can imagine this being used outside the Walled Garden too, with one operator using it to offer IPTV class services over the internet, to PCs that sit on broadband lines supplied by rival operators,’ he added.
The company has had two rounds of cash, totalling around £8 million ($16 million) from London Merchant Securities and has worked in the pst with Atos Origin, and says it is looking for similar deals with IBM and Accenture for integration services.
Our view is that an 18 man company with a little extra offshore product development from India, may write exceptionally sharp and hardworking code, but so far within the IPTV space, the size of the partner has often won the day, not the sophistication of their offerings. However if AssetHouse is right and the back ends of all the IPTV services across Europe are unable to create new imaginative product offerings on the fly, then retrofitting a flexible service creation back end is essential before they all try to stretch their offerings into the portable and mobile worlds.