Back in September last year Swedish VoD innovator Edgeware said that it was on the trail of its first Tier 1 telco as a customer and at IPTV World Forum last week duly delivered it in the form of TeliaSonera.
The Nordic operator has deployed Edgeware’s Orbit 2x server system to deliver on-demand TV and video services. Edgeware uses up to 6 terrabytes of Flash memory on its distributed VoD appliances, a move that in retrospect now seems inevitable, with VoD shifting from quality disk based, to cheap redundant disks, to distributed servers and then on to diskloaded RAM held content, and now finally to Flash.
Those trends have taken more than a decade to pan out, and already Edgeware’s architecture is being emulated by all the existing VoD suppliers in new product releases, most notably one recent one from SeaChange International.
In the beginning VoD was delivered from a single central server somewhere in a pay TV network. Later, in IPTV, a distributed architecture was put in place by companies like BitBand. Broadbus came along and decided that all of the VoD files should be pre-loaded into ram to make them faster to serve, and at last year’s IBC we saw the next step, a 6 terrabyte Flash memory VoD appliances from Edgeware.
The Stockholm based company broke onto the IPTV scene almost exactly a year ago when it announced its Orbit range of VoD servers which began shipping last February, and already boasts middleware integration with a number of software suppliers. As well as announcing the TeliaSonera deal, Edgeware said that UK student network Inuk Networks, has also signed to use its VoD servers to its 40,000 plus viewers.
But TeliaSonera is growing extremely rapidly in its IPTV service and back in January the company said that in Sweden, with a population of just 9 million, and with just 3.7 million pay TV homes, it has grabbed over 8% of the pay market with IPTV in just a few years, putting on 100,000 homes during the last quarter alone.
Telia has some experience running a pay TV operation, since it used to own cable company Com Hem. Back in 2003 the European Commission forced the sale this cable operation as one of the conditions for allowing Telia and Sonera to merge, and Sweden’s largest cable TV business was picked up by private equity firm EQT Partners. Since then UPC Sweden has been added to it, taking subscribers to 1.7 million, a big chunk of those 3.7 million pay TV homes.
The 300,000 mark was passed in the early days of January at TelaiSonera, corresponding to a big jump in VoD movie rentals which began over Christmas and New Year, with customers renting 68,000 films. Many larger incumbents would kill for an 8% IPTV penetration, from a standing start, in under two years and now Edgeware will have the dream reference account that any new breakthrough technology needs.
The architecture is based on Edgeware’s Orbit 2x, which is a high density, high performance and ultra low power consumption video server appliance. Each Orbit 2x hosts up to 3 TB of flash memory content storage and is capable of reliably streaming 20 Gbps to more than 16,000 concurrent users from anywhere in the network.
The TeliaSonera installation consists of both central and edge servers, hierarchically distributed throughout the country, and managed by the Origin remote management system. Content is automatically distributed by Edgeware’s Convoy asset propagation system. The installation automatically ingests video content from multiple providers and performs time shift of live TV channels at virtually zero latency.
“TeliaSonera views TV as one of the services that will drive the migration from fixed telephony to IP and open up for future revenues. Consumers require on-demand services in various forms and that is what we are delivering. Our IPTV initiative is vital for the future of TeliaSonera.” says Janne Yli-‘yh’, Senior Vice President and Head of TeliaSonera’s TV, content and Digital Home commitments.
The hardware behind Edgeware is based on an FPGA from Altera and the company has already integrated it with the Verimatrix IPTV DRM system.
Part of the trick of the system is working out parallel paths into the flash memory in order to sustain the high output rate, so that requires a special Flash chip run. Unlike the ram based Broadbus system, which must be loaded from inexpensive attached disks, the Orbit just accepts a copy of a film from a distribution platform and stores it there. Since flash survives around 100,000 read writes the company reckons that these devices will offer 9 years mean time between failure and the system can ingest video at 600 mbps.