There is no future in being just another browser company in the IPTV world, so when Brian Mahony at Espial called us last week and we said, ‘Yeah you’re that browser company,’ he felt he had a lot of explaining to do.
The message was ‘Yes, we used to be, but so much has happened, we’re also a middleware company, with a bundled head end and advanced client server architecture.’ But doesn’t the IPTV market have too many middleware firms chasing too little in the way of new business?
It’s not too surprising that Espial felt that it needed to move on. The IPTV market has only just come out of a state of suspended animation, a condition it’s been in for around two years, frozen by the tier one market grip extended by Alcatel and Microsoft.
During that time there have been multiple entries into the middleware market with Minerva engineering the move from encoder maker to middleware supplier successfully, and companies like DreamPark emerging out of nowhere to land some orders, while Kasenna and Seachange both shifted themselves from VoD suppliers to a middleware offering, with no orders yet in sight.
But like browser market leader ANT, Espial has a head start over many of these companies and has the added incentive that html will no longer get the set top client job done, and needs revision and extension anyway.
Already the Espial Escape and EVO browsers have led the company into some of the tier one accounts that most of these others are denied, with the browser being embedded in the Siemens Myrio system, installed at Belgacom and KPN, while NTT has installed 280,000 copies of Espial software in fiber to the home service in Japan, and last year took a decision to roll it out to a potential market of 30 million homes.
And on the embedded side of the business the browser technology has been used as a menuing system for Hitachi TV sets, and it has 3 million installations in the hospitality market through systems used by Lodgenet and On Command.
But from here the company has felt the need to extend its software, initially on the client, and late last year it launched its own server, described as a multicast carousel, which delivers everything from the EPG, to advertising, to content search capabilities through a downloaded index, and customer support applications.
‘It’s a data driven architecture which manages the handshake between the server and the set top, said Mahony
‘What you are after on a set top these days is the performance of C, combined with the openness of HTML and Javascript, so what we have extended into is a combination of pre-compiled applications with data management separated out.
‘There is a 10 Megabyte compressed index inside the set top. So the viewer is not hitting the head end with a request every time the customer carries out a search. On our systems viewers can search DVR, pay per view or EPG listings all at once.’
And the carousel is the approach Espial takes to eliminate bottlenecks which Mahony says are typically found within browser-based systems
‘The carousel integrates advertising servers, Tribune Media Services data (one of the sources for US channel information) and VoD data and Pay per view data, plus promotions and EPG data. Unlike Microsoft’s system, we require one server to manage all of this for between 30,000 and 100,000 customers, depending on how many different types of data are being handled.’
But left in the control of the client is the ability to change the look and feel of the user interface. ‘We have Skin tones so that UI can be personalized by the operator to customize his brand, and also by the user which can shape their EPG look and feel.
‘Sumitomo in Japan used an interface where people navigate doors as if they were moving around a movie theatre and we can switch skin tones dynamically to an entirely different look and feel, all populated locally. Most systems put the load on the head end to retrieve central definitions of look and feel.
‘That was alright when operators wanted centralized control and everything to look the same, but once you’ve built your architecture like that, it’s hard to let different customers have a different look and feel unless you are using a UI presentation engine that sits in the client.
‘We still use a browser for VoD and for access to the web or to the operator walled garden, but if you use it for everything it leads to delays. The browser now is just one application and we use other applications to manage EPG load and channel change.
And in that way it had modularized its approach for things like radio and caller ID on the TV screen, rather than driving them through the browser.
And it also means that services can be delivered not only to a TV set top, but also to a PC or a mobile client in the future, Mahony says.
‘At UPC Sweden, EVO has just been used to integrate with an older system. They wanted a new set top, another DRM and a third party VoD server. It took one consultant just 4 months to complete all that because of the way our system is architected.’