Irdeto wrapped all its IBC demos in the language of social networking, but underneath that there is a growing list of product that have little, if anything to do with its traditional conditional access business.
Instead it is positioning itself as a provider of online video service for pay TV providers, with much of its resource being held in the cloud, adding search, social network communication and recommendation systems to the ingest and content management systems that it has previously acquired.
The core products come out of Entriq, a company that began inside the Irdeto company and then split away, and from DayPort, a company that Entriq bought during its absence from the company. Dayport brought it content management, an advertising model and streaming media capability.
So while the Irdeto message at IBC was all about Social Upselling, using social networks to offer recommendations and for pay TV operators to use that in the upselling process, it was really about giving it a new lease on life ‘ a chance to go into accounts where it does not provide the conditional access, and bid to take their pay TV businesses onto the internet.
The paradigm of this approach is Viasat in Sweden, where it won a contract at the beginning of 2009. NDS already provides the conditional access there, and today NDS might also make a bid for the online video side of the business, but at the time didn’t have the product line.
Viasat used a collection of tools simply called Irdeto Broadband and made content available, movies in particular, across Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, initially on a PC. The next, inevitable step Irdeto was also showing at IBC, but this was in an iPad application that it has just installed for Sky Deutschland.
The same system that is installed at Viasat system is at the heart of this, and also at the heart of how Irdeto has learned about what customers want and how they will respond to social network recommendations on networks like Facebook
Christopher Schouten, senior director solutions marketing at Irdeto told us, ‘We will partner with other DRMs, and already have systems that work with Windows Media DRM, with PlayReady and also with Adobe Flash Access 2.0 and we are agnostic on the subject of streaming protocols, we work with both Microsoft IIS Smooth streaming and Adobe. We have deals with Astro in Malaysia, Austar and Foxtel in Australia, Sky Deutschland, Sky News in the UK.’
The system at Viasat has already expanded onto mobile devices and offers a one-stop shop for movies and a choice of subscription and free services. Irdeto tools are also used there for transcoding, search and advertising.
Irdeto says that it supplied the entire end to end workflow management from ingestion to usage reporting using its Publish, Control and Monetize and Players modules (see diagram).
The more recent Sky Deutschland deal is just about Sport and it runs on the iPad, which gets the content delivered over WiFi, but also if delivered over 3G shorter clips are available. Our own preference was the one instance at IBC where we saw content coming out of a set top box and running on the iPad, but this parallel delivery on an iPad, especially for sport, coming over broadband, will win a lot of fans and sell a lot of tablets.
The system comes with text search, which clearly Irdeto handles in the cloud a bit like recent TiVo Over The Top deals in Europe and content can have video advertising spliced into it based on content type.
‘You can select a piece of content and then say get me more content like this. When two pieces of content are similar, the system will create a name for that mood or channel, and put them in the same favorites list. You can then share what you think of them on Twitter and Facebook and add recommendations to friends news feeds, with just a couple of clicks. If they share the same subscription right then they can watch it, if not that’s a chance to offer them an up-sell to a subscription that does allow it,’ explained Schouten.
The trouble right now is that no-one is quite sure how social TV will work out. Sure we want to ask our peers what they are watching, point them at other material we like, but there is no substitute to having an installed based to see what works and what doesn’t.
The Sky Deutschland VoD iPad app was custom built by Reply/Syskoplan Ag and lets consumers access live streaming of events like the FIFA World Cup 2010 and was delivered in partnership with bitmama, Plazamedia and Akamai.