It’s been a long road for PC based IPTV, but the jury must still be out on it, even though it formed quite a few of the announcements and awards at this week’s IPTV World Forum in London.
Conditional access specialist Verimatrix made a fuss about launching the next generation of its PC client ViewRight, with CEO Tom Munro claiming to us that more than just a handful of its 107 Telco clients around the world are trialing the software, and considering launching live services on it.
Rival Widevine both won an award at the show for its PC/Mobile video security client, and announced a new deal for it as the protection on the new Zignal Cloud platform launched by Industria.
At Faultline we remain unconvinced. Our first run in with PC clients for IPTV was back 18 months ago at IBC when VoD and IPTV Middleware company Kasenna announced it was opening a link to the PC.
We can’t say it sank without trace, but since Kasenna these days is quiet as a mouse about everything it does, we assume not much is going on. We’ve certainly not heard of a telco announcing a service with it.
The same goes for the first version of the Verimatrix ViewRight PC player, announced at the same show, and most people in the IPTV arena say that the big obstacle to offering a paid IPTV service on a PC is that your help desk ends up having to fix PCs, not fix the service.
And there are clues in the Verimatrix announcement. It does everything that the first version does. We pulled out the release for that product and compared it to the new version, and could find no real differences. It has DVR capabilities, and it has the patent pending Verimatrix watermarking system. So perhaps the second generation is just one that works, or at least works better, so that it keeps those help desks calls to a minimum.
CEO Tom Munro walked us through the Verimatrix system, telling how the company has had to port its decryption libraries and its video watermark libraries to the PC, write its own PC based Media Player, because using separate OEM modules just wasn’t secure enough, and how it has bundled codecs from MainConcept, the German DiVX subsidiary which specializes in H.264 codecs. The company claims that this gives it the only independently audited secure PC client, but it said exactly the same thing 18 months ago when it launched the first version. By now we suspect that Widevine has some form of verification that its PC player is somewhat safe, especially since back in December 2006 Widevine was issued with patents on how to send secure content to untrusted platforms such as PCs, which included methods for monitoring what it calls the ‘digital hole’ which is all about what happens to content which has just been decrypted, as well as patents for tamper detection.
The Widevine deal this week was just a flimsy really with Icelandic firm Industria, which spans Bulgaria and China for developers, and is based in Iceland and the UK, launching its own web TV service Zignal Cloud.
The Zignal Entertainment Delivery Platform is all about serving set tops, PCs and mobile devices on the same server, but that sounds to us yet another ‘three screen’ dream with little substance.
Widevine this week also announced that it is now providing content protection on the French Archos line of portable video players. Archos has always been a client of Windows Media DRM, so we presume that it can now run either system, and that this is a response to a either a telco client request, or its largest outside shareholder EchoStar, to shift to a different DRM system.
Three screen approaches are trickier than everyone thinks. The handset has been fuelled by snack-based video experiences, primarily because the quality of streamed 3GPP cellular is so bad, no-one can look at it for too long, not because the screen is too small, as real broadcast Mobile TV is proving. The only people that use PCs to view IPTV are people without TVs, and that invariably means students. UK IPTV service UK Inuk Networks, has signed up 40,000 students to paid and free IPTV services, but that’s only possible because all the universities have multicast routers.
Any other PC based IPTV, without a Quality of Service layer or those multicast routers, is really a streaming experience, and mostly that is catered for by systems like Harmonic’s Rhozet, which it bought last year for just $15.5 million, which it believes will merge with its Entone VoD server business and create potential revenue streams not from taking IPTV to the web, but in taking VoD to existing broadcast businesses, giving them a second source of potential free to air advertising revenue, even where they don’t require the real time encoding power of the top of the line Harmonic encoders.
Similarly last year, instead of acquiring someone, encoder company Envivio, which has the lion’s share of all Mobile TV encoding globally, launched its own three screen encoding system last August. It was also on show at IPTV World Forum this week, with multiple CIF or QVGA screens, SD and HD and picture in picture images all encoded from a single encoder, in formats as diverse as Flash, VC-1, H.264, H.264 simple profile (for mobile),the Chinese codec AVS and Windows Media, all delivered to either one or many screens, at once, from the same encoding set up. It uses the company’s Trans4M (C4) architecture, one ingest, multiple format outputs. That kind of vision is getting closer to the real issues behind three screen targeting where one set of streams do have Quality of Service, and another doesn’t so it needs end to end traffic rate sensing, and scaling back the signal accordingly.
And perhaps that’s the real reason for the IPTV world to be currently fixated on protection for these services, perhaps the encoding link of the chain is now mature enough to make considerable savings in offering three screens on one system, so encryption systems perhaps have dusted off their somewhat ancient toolboxes to help out.
Verimatrix’s Munro insisted that the time for PC screens at least is now. ‘Telco clients can offer this as a second screen in the home, when two people want to watch different things, and also as a way of reaching out to potential new customers,’ and he claims to have 2 Asian and 1 European tier one clients that are in trial, and likely to launch services shortly.
Perhaps in Asia where some countries have fiber architectures where 100 Mbps speeds have to be supported, there may be the basis to use this type of system. But we would argue that in places like Korea, where there are no multicast IPTV services, the systems required are simply very fast versions of internet only TV systems, mostly using non-real time encoding, and speeds fast enough for multiple HD streams per home. Services there are being rolled out by Hanaro, now controlled by SK Telecom, as well as Korea Telecom’s MegaTV. But if this is a web system only, then it needs a web DRM system only, not one like the Verimatrix or Widevine systems that were designed for IPTV, and which are then adapted to web systems.
So are IPTV services on PCs delivered via a multicast or through multiple streams? ‘However it’s done Verimatrix VCAS can protect it,’ says Munro, and very few PC only systems out there will have things like Geo-Authentication and Quantum ID,’ he said. These are features of the Verimatrix DRM that place a DSLAM identifier into the encryption keys, and which also rely on user behavioral data, such as how long since you last watched a particular channel, and he may have a point.
But if this year is going to be the year when IPTV systems strike out into the PC and handset territory, they will need to convince the content owners, both the broadcasters that commission content and the studios, that the PC is a safe place to leave encrypted content lying around.
We can see that the handset has already become an acceptable place to store content, but the only system Hollywood seems happy with on the PC is Windows Media DRM, which in the guise of the new system PlayReady, has made its way onto Nokia handsets, and will no doubt be used on consumer electronics devices, PCs and finally be backwards compatible with the Microsoft Mediaroom DRM ‘ and by default may end up as the most deployed PC based content protection, even though it appears to the world to be the least effective.