Back in 2007 when Ericsson was clearly the leading voice behind the creation of the Open IPTV Forum (OIPF), we decried it as an IPTV big company club, with no IPTVers in sight ‘ mostly noting the lack of Alcatel Lucent and Microsoft in the lineup, and of course a complete lack of Chinese co-operation.
At the time Alcatel had installed about 40% of the world’s DSL broadband lines and was dominant in China and Microsoft had just landed a dozen or so tier one accounts for IPTV, with a system design very different from the traditional IPTV that was born in Europe at the turn of the century.
With the news this week that Tandberg TV, the company that Ericsson has used to buy its way into IPTV, albeit very partially, will change its name to Ericsson, and the fact that the (OIPF) has introduced some interoperability testing, you might think that all that has changed.
Ericsson has always taken the view that TV is just one small part in the overall multimedia equation, and it considers its customers to be the cellular operators around the world, some (actually many) of which are also telcos.
Of course Tandberg TV never viewed it that way. It targets broadcast, cable, satellite and IPTV, and although it has launched an encoder range for cellular, it hasn’t had much success with it. It’s like Tandberg for the 2 and a half years since the acquisition, has never quite taken on board the public Ericsson persona. Perhaps it thought it was never really invited to join Ericsson? Now its identity has been rightly submerged into its parent.
Today there are still only one or two minor IPTV installations that owe anything to Ericsson apart from the division that was Tandberg encoders, and although historically the OIPF was arranged as an Ericsson led initiative, today it is taking on a real purpose, and one which might well come to haunt suppliers everywhere, and yet help operators.
The first Interoperability Event took place from Nov 16th – 20th at Fraunhofer FOKUS in Berlin, Germany and the idea is simple, take the multiple subtly different ways in which IPTV is conducted and without facilitating a particular business model and without forcing a particular architecture on operators, create device interoperability so there can be no supplier lock in. Well that’s probably too late, where IPTV is installed and in many cases on its second generation of equipment, the lock-ins are already there.
The Interoperability event was supported by Ericsson, Fraunhofer FOKUS, Motorola and Sharp. The only name in there which has an IPTV tradition is Motorola, in the guise of the Kreatel European set top subsidiary it bought a few years back. That division of Motorola is clearly up for sale and so it remains to be seen whether or not the OIPF really has supplier support for true interoperability. We’re not sure any of them will be rushing to get a badge from an organization initiated by Ericsson, to say they do IPTV in a proper and standard way.
The interoperability tests were between what Ericsson calls ‘consumer terminal equipment’ and IMS-based IPTV middleware and gateways. Already we are baffled. We know there have been recent initiatives between a variety of IMS suppliers to operate in a common way for voice when it arrives on LTE, but is there really a single installation of IPTV which uses IMS as yet?
IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) is a multimedia framework which takes IP based network services and manages the seamless translation of those same services onto a cellular network. If all networks were IP, IMS would be out of a job, and once LTE arrives, more suitable for IP based services, then surely IMS is either dead, or a more popular idea is that finally its aims are achievable, whereas transitioning from switched networks to packet networks, was too much of a stumbling block.
What IMS then becomes is a common set of ground rules for integrating cellular and wired networks, so a single service can travel over both, in a seamless fashion. IMS relies on server based format translations to offer things like billing and call duration to any device and things like video transcoding can all be done on the fly, under control and in time to make sense across multiple, attached networks. As far as we can make out no IMS is alike, and it feels like the 7 layer ISO model all over again ‘ a great theoretical framework, but no one ever built one.
So perhaps the Open IPTV Forum is really about promoting Ericsson in an IMS world. What the interoperability forum proved was that one service could be sent to a Motorola set top, and also to a Sharp cellphone.
Our instincts tell us that in practical terms, most operators are already thinking in terms of running parallel services for the two types of networks, rather than running one effort and an IMS to support TVs, PC and handsets.
What the OIPF is trying to say is that because two devices which were designed to its version 1 specification can talk to one another, then all the others that adhere to it should be able to, and that companies like Amino, , LGE, Pirelli and Samsung should start building commercial versions.
We understand that if there was a single way for a set top to issue a ‘join multicast’ instruction, then it would mean that like cable and satellite, IPTV operators could order one set top at the beginning of an IPTV installation and switch to a different one whenever it liked without anyone paying a few $ million for a new integration effort. In the same way a set top could have a universal piece of software on it that could accept a streamed version of a TV channel, and that this could work the same way at the sever end, regardless of what the handset was capable of.
It would be a wonderful bright new world, where vendors would get screwed down on prices, and operators would make more money. Remind us again why Ericsson would like that?
According to Mr. Diego Gibellino, Telecom Italia “From a Telecom Operator perspective it is quite significant that the forum has been able to gather companies around early implementations just after the completion of the OIPF Release 1 specifications. The availability of equipments and devices and their capability to interoperate in a multi-vendor environment are the fundamental value that the specifications can bring to the market “.
Well that spelled it out, it is exactly as we thought. What Ericsson has to gain from this is that the provision of an IMS to an operator is something of a lock-in not to suppliers, where it is the opposite, but to one supplier in particular, the company that either runs your network or who provides your IMS. Ericsson plans to do both, and has cut a number of deals this year and in previous years, where network management and provisioning is outsourced to it.
So given that for the most part Ericsson is the client here, the cheaper devices and more readily competitive framework created by IPTV IMS based standards, will mean that it can make savings, not only for its clients, but given that all its contracts are policed by strict SLAs, for its own benefit.
But still Ericsson is starting to look like it might be successful in all of this. The OIPF now has 58 members globally, and there have been some significant admissions, as well as departures.
Microsoft is still not among the members, but now it does include Alcatel Lucent, the company that has provided more IPTV infrastructure than any other Western business, not perhaps because it needs the IPTV standard, but perhaps because it needs to be sure that Ericsson doesn’t steal a march out from where it is dominant, in UMTS cellular networks, into the wider Telco marketplace.
There are also heavyweights in equipment provision for much the same reason, with the addition of Cisco and the continued interest of Nokia Siemens Networks, but more importantly the arrival of the Chinese operations of UTStarcom and Huawei, one dominant in Chinese IPTV, the other fast gaining ground as one of the leading lights in overall telco equipment supply.
But nowhere in the membership list is the company that gave the Forum its credibility in the early days, AT&T which seems to have disappeared, but significantly the Italian IPTV pioneer Fastweb has been added to the membership.
Can it be that this is now the club for all the non-Mediaroom operators and that it sets itself in opposition to the Mediaroom world, which has yet to embrace IMS in any way shape or form and a few years ago even had what might have been considered a rival to IMS, in its Connected Services Framework, which is now defunct.
Initially this Forum had none of the ‘Other’ smaller IPTV pioneers but now it does, companies such as Verimatrix, Secure Media, Thomson and the independent set top makers Amino and Netgem, although you still won’t see Pace among the members, nor encoder makes Harmonic, Optibase and Modulus. More disturbingly is the lack of Apple in any group even where it is not part of its key technical wherewithal.
We are moving to a point where we have the Microsoft way of doing things, which can use Microsoft equipment and software virtually from end to end; the traditional way of doing IPTV, which has fallen into the hands and guidance of OIPF; the ‘old’ stalwarts way of doing IPTV and companies who think that over the top is the right business model (Apple) and who don’t support any kind of QoS styled IPTV.