It’s not been a secret, but NDS can finally say that it has a Snowflake based UI service in operation, having switched from trial to wide availability this week on Zon Multimedia’s TV Cabo service in Portugal. The new UI will sit on high end set tops distributed to the 1.5 million TV Cabo customer base and begin distribution as of now, and some existing customers can get it for free. TV Cabo has about 1.1 million cable and 400,000 DTH customers, The NDS design is aimed at just the cable customers, and requires a high speed EuroDOCSIS cable modem.
New services under the brand of ‘Iris by Zon Fibra’ using the new UI will be sold in a variety of bundles, some with broadband, at a variety of speeds, starting in packages at €50 a month and going up. Shortly Zon will introduce the same UI on other platforms such as the PC, Apple and perhaps Android tablets.
The combination of NDS MediaHighway middleware and the Snowflake UI, a kind of easily navigated 3D onscreen grid overlay, is the NDS bid for look and feel leadership, irrespective of the conditional access service that an operator has.
Already NDS has had a Snowflake design win, potentially massive, at Liberty Global, where it will integrate video content, widgets, apps, and an advanced search and recommendation engine, on a Samsung built set top driven by Intel chips. Cloud based recommendation is part and parcel of the Snowflake product. Liberty Global owns UPC, among others, and has cable operations in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland, and took a decision in May last year to adopt Snowflake, but has yet to roll it out.
To us this is NDS putting down a marker in the world of TV Apps and Cloud based recommendation, which were both pioneered by TiVo, without which operators will feel compelled to either put down their own App Stores, or eventually feel the need to reach for the easy decision of adopting Google TV and its associated Android Market apps, and integrate that into their strategy.
Already TV manufacturers are building their own OTT apps to work on their TV sets, regardless of what pay TV service they are attached to. Samsung said just a few days ago that it has now passed the 2 million TV App download mark, taking just 53 days for its second million to be downloaded. People are getting the idea that they can download Apps to televisions. Most of these Samsung Apps were free and the leading downloads included those from YouTube, Hulu Plus, ESPN Next Level, AccuWeather, Google Maps and Texas Holdem.
App are coming to TV whether an operator wants it or not and we are now embroiled in something akin to the Walled Garden wars of the cellular marketplace, where slowly the Walled Gardens are breaking down, and open markets such as Android, or strongly branded proprietary markets such as Apple’s are taking over.
Most cellular handset makers have their own apps plan, and most cellcos harbor ambitions to support ALL their handsets and all their networks on a single App Store. So if the TV market reflects that, we should see OTT apps from handset vendors, broadcaster and Pay TV service App offerings, as well as for particular TV brands, as well as open, generic platforms.
We can’t imagine why an operator wouldn’t mandate Android or MeeGo as an OS on its top end set tops, and do in TV what China Mobile has done with its oPhone architecture on phones – build their own App Store, under their own brand? That would automatically leave all the technical problems with Google, and let them concentrate on content offerings and App selection, creation and procurement.
Such an operator might specify non-Google apps in their initial set up, to preclude Google dominance, and although this is a slippery slope, which will (could) eventually lead to pay TV operators losing control of the TV App agenda, it is the easy route, or at least would be the easy route, except for a couple of facts. First Google TV is in its infancy, and we can reckon that it won’t be any good, or give an advantage to operators who decide to deploy it, for perhaps two more years, and secondly there are companies from the traditional pay TV world, taken from set top makers, middleware producers, conditional access suppliers and even browser specialists, who are automatically on the side of the Pay TV operator and who already know what a decent TV interface looks like.
The downside in choosing someone like NDS, is that they are a proprietary company which leads to a tie in, in terms of applications, but also it makes it hard for companies to replace their hardware suppliers down the road.
The other major players in the battle for control of pay TV experiences in Europe include search specialists like blinkx, technology companies like TiVo, from the US, or even Rovi (nee Gemstar – which works on Google TV). TiVo already has the high ground in modern OTT based service delivery and in Europe has with deals at Canal Digital, Virgin Media and Ono, in France the UK and Spain. These are hybrid pay TV/OTT services which rely on the key skills where TiVo has a lead, not just DVR (where it does lead) but also cloud based recommendation and search, and the creation of EPGs on the fly, which are combined into integrated services in the cloud.
So this is now where NDS is headed, an appropriate direction considering the way Kudelski, Nagravision’s parent, has snapped up OpenTV, which has its own interactive satellite middleware, and which is now exploring addressable advertising. NDS has been fighting for global dominance of conditional access in Pay TV markets with Nagravision since the market began and are ranked one and two (though we’re not sure in which order).
So right now NDS won’t be seeing Google TV as a threat, but sees this entire landscape as a way of tightening its grip on Pay TV. It is great news to NDS that both of its Snowflake accounts, both Zon with TV Cabo and Liberty Global, are Nagravision customers, and getting into customers of your greatest rival always gives you something of a kick, because it means you can do something they can’t do.
But in the long run the market for Apps on TVs will be split by a major force like Android/ Google on one side, and one or two suppliers, who side with Pay TV operators, on the other. And Nagravision is looking less dangerous in this market than NDS, especially given that Nagravision’s North American partner Dish Corp, has already embraced Google TV by tightly integrating it with its pay TV services, as well as partially adopting Nagravision rival Widevine (now owned by Google) as the technology to encrypt its TV Everywhere service.
While Nagravision is up to many things in the pay TV market, its vision does not include enabling TV Apps for its clients, and that could leave it vulnerable against NDS and others, like TiVo, which has its own conditional access partners, such as Conax in Northern Europe.
In the early market for OTT services, set top makers such as Amino have embraced MeeGo and the huge Intel base of applications for its first tier one win at Telecom Italia, and more will follow, especially if Intel pushes TV apps into its AppUp app store, launched late last year, although right now we expect that store will be covering the Tablet home base first and may take a while to get off the mark in set top Apps.
In fact if you are a set top maker, you can plow your own furrow far more easily alongside MeeGo and Intel than you can alongside Google, so it’s likely to be their early operating system of choice, except where a pay TV operator elects for a different OS.
But even these don’t preclude NDS, because systems like Snowflake, we are sure, can be shifted, and even the core functionality of its own MediaHighway middleware, can be adapted to these Linux variants with relative ease, so its challenge in the TV App space seems to be set to run for quite a while yet.
Nuno Sanches, Head of TV Products at Zon commented: ‘By placing the user at the heart of the TV experience we feel we’ve been able to offer a truly next-generation product that builds on TV’s heritage as a shared experience, with simple, elegant navigation that redefines it for the internet generation.’ He added ‘NDS’ design skill and pay-TV expertise have been invaluable on this project and we look forward to continuing our relationship to take an already phenomenal user experience even further.’
The award-winning NDS Snowflake was designed by Paris based NDS Studio Design, which Zon also engaged for branding consultancy across the platform ‘ including advertising and point of sale design.NDS announced the Zon trial at IBC in September. NDS first picked up Zon as a customer in January of last year when it began using residential gateways from NDS subsidiary Jungo.