Well we have come up with a number of scenarios in the past, whereby Nortel gets into the IPTV middleware market, but we never picked the one that has actually happened, whereby the NDS MediaHighway system is now being resold by Nortel.
Nortel said this week it has signed a global reseller and joint marketing agreement with NDS, and the companies will work together to facilitate the integration of Nortel’s voice and multimedia features into the TV environment. MediaHighway was originally acquired from Thomson of France, which now sells the France Telecom designed IPTV middleware.
Our excuse for not pitching this outcome is that NDS seems to have sufficient marketing muscle on its own to push its underused, but potentially strong middleware competitor against the 30 or so IPTV middleware systems that are out there.
And by integrating Nortel’s voice and multimedia products into MediaHighway, the system could rapidly come to rival the market lead that Alcatel Microsoft has established in this market, although it is not strictly only usable by IPTV systems, and one or two satellite DTH companies are using a variant of it such as Premiere in Germany.
Planned features include caller ID, call handling, address book, click-to-dial, call-logs, IM messaging and other IP-based communication services. It sounds like a feature list from Microsoft’s IPTV devision.
Any hope left for middleware start ups like Orca to attract Nortel as a bidder, must now evaporate. Orca is thought to be in negotiations to be acquired by Comverse which has launched Comverse IPTV, built around Orca RiGHTV, to push towards a triple play offering with the NetCentrex VoIP features added.
If you add Nortel’s strong IMS to this picture, and the potential to drive out towards mobile video portals, the partnership looks like it might fly, although it is likely to be tied to the existing NDS card based conditional access systems, rather than being agnostic where DRM and CA are concerned.
Nortel and NDS demonstrated their combined system at the IPTV World Forum this week in London, UK.