The first thing that we thought when we heard that Ericsson, after five years or so in the IPTV wilderness, has finally bitten the bullet and launched its own IPTV middleware was ‘What a disaster for poor Tandberg.’ Our inside intelligence now says that Tandberg has brought this on itself.
The logic is straightforward ‘ any IPTV middleware company has a key role to play in recommending and integrating other elements of an IPTV strategy, including encoders, where Tandberg Television gets most of its revenues from today, along with QAM for Cable operators and some fiber optics.
But suddenly Tandberg will be very much a part of an ‘end to end’ strategy, which will push out many middleware partners from plum contracts. So it stands to reason that those middleware companies will no longer ask Tandberg to quote for any of the encoder business where they, or their integration partners are the prime contractors for IPTV installations – and given that IPTV is one of the fastest growing areas of pay TV services around the world, that could come back to haunt Tandberg.
Of smaller effect is the fact that Ericsson will be unlikely to be asked to become the prime integration partner for IPTV contracts ‘ a small middleware company is unlikely to have any say over this, but then again Ericsson has spectacularly failed to grab this particular thorn and has only ever built out one or two IPTV sites, the most famous of which is the tiny installation at Vodafone Og, the Icelandic IPTV service built around the Smartvision middleware now owned by Thomson. The rest of these deals have all led to Alcatel winning business either fronted by Microsoft Mediaroom or by its own OMP software or the software it merged it with, inherited from Telefonica, once called Imagenio, and now referred to as MiViewTV, which itself is said to be tightly coupled with Lucent’s IMS.
Ericsson is making that self same claim, to have integrated its IPTV middleware with its own IMS, a clear rival to the one supported by Lucent and both considered to be ahead of the supplier pack (alongside perhaps the offering from Nortel/IBM). IMS is a sub system designed to homogenize multimedia on an IP carriage, across both IP networks and switched networks including cellular systems, and were all the rage and leading edge back in 2006, but have since fallen into the general technology background of major operators and are no longer real supplier differentiators.
Ericsson managed to launch this service in what is little more than a one line press release, when what it needs is a lengthy explanation and the answers to many questions relating to set top, DRM and VoD integration, explaining exactly what the software does and what elements it requires in the way of network servers for EPG etc’ For instance if the system cannot manage picture in picture, a video mosaic screen selection process, whole home DVR then it will not break into the market. We also need to understand things like what is the buffer size of the set top, what video quality elements come integrated, for instance does it use a forward error correction code or local packet resend or both or neither? And of course what QoS system does the network use? At the set top level does it offer trickplay to support DVRs? None of these questions are answered on white papers, on press releases or by calling Tandberg, which does not bode well for one of the biggest equipment suppliers in all of telecommunications breaking into the IPTV world, which brings with it large network upgrades to fixed networks, as well as breakthrough mobile video services.
All Ericsson would say is that the system is built on open standards based on the Open IPTV Forum, and it supplies a list of partners. The Open IPTV Forum was formed in March 2007 and was a collection of suppliers that didn’t include Alcatel or Microsoft, but which had on board AT&T, Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens Networks, Sony, and Telecom Italia, and stated that its mission was to work towards an interoperable end-to-end specification for delivery of IPTV services. Here they mean interoperability between different services within one operator and as such this was all about format conversions and billing commonality using IMS.
This July membership of the Open IPTV Forum lifted to 37 by including the likes of Motorola, BeeTV, Opera Software, FastWeb, Thomson, Digital Fountain, Swisscom, Intel, ZyXEL and DRM specialist Intertrust.
The suppliers that Ericsson announced with included content aggregator Accedo Broadband, video quality monitoring company Agama Technologies, set top suppliers Amino and Tilgin, server supplier HP, DRM companies SecureMedia and Verimatrix and home gateway company ZyXEL. Sun Microsystems is also thrown into the mix, but we can’t tell if this is because of its set top Java based interactive middleware (MHP) or because it offers a open source CAS, because Ericsson just doesn’t say and when we asked a spokesman for Ericsson, they didn’t know either.
We understand that the middleware was designed by the Tandberg team and came out of some software work that the company took with it to Ericsson when it was acquired 18 months ago. But why when the middleware market is congested and the encoder market is there for the taking?
Ericsson did have a marketing pact with VoD and middleware supplier Kasenna, but it never implemented a single system that we know about, and Kasenna was recently sold to Espial for a fraction of the investment that was put into the company.
Ericsson did talk about the IPTV services that it will offer, being both personalized and interactive and featuring features high-definition, interactivity, personal video recorder and video-on-demand functions, and working with the TV, the PC or the handset.
And Ericsson said that through integration with IMS, the system integrates presence information, messaging and parental control.
It is very hard, even with Alcatel under the cosh, performing badly and under new management, to see how Ericsson is going to wrest control of the IPTV and/or broadband agenda from Alcatel. Most major European and US operators have already chosen their IPTV partners, and this all seems too little too late for Ericsson, unless the IMS integration is truly impressive or the company can truly change the IPTV paradigm, by opening it up to the handset in some way.