It seems a bit late in the day to be saying which encoders they are using, but the CANTV IPTV system, from one of the largest telecommunications companies in Venezuela, originally announced as a deal for China’s ZTE back in April, has only just got around to releasing the fact that Israel’s Optibase will provide the head end equipment.
Optibase says it will provide an H.264 encoding platform to the major implementor ZTE which when it announced the deal, said it was a $400 million implementation, involving hundreds of live broadcast channels. The head end will use the Optibase MGW 5100 standard definition, hardware-based encoders which will support secondary stream so that the final system can use picture in picture.
When Microsoft Mediaroom first came on the scene, one of its key differentiators, along with rapid channel change, was this type of picture in picture capability, and since then (2005 or so) every encoder maker has had to work towards bringing this capability online. It is done by encoding multiple resolutions of each stream, and allowing the DSLAM and local set top to call on them when a smaller picture is needed, for instance for a live video version of EPG panels, or for reviewing what’s on the next channel, without changing channels.
However ZTE has not publicized what middleware it has used for CANTV (we think it has its own) or which set top boxes. ZTE did announced a global co-operation deal with Amino Communications in the UK on set tops in March this year, but it is usual for IPTV suppliers to have at least two or three set top suppliers, so we can’t say for sure these are Amino set tops.
And given that the Venezuela deal is for SD set tops, all of the 60 or so set top makers that are in and around IPTV globally could supply it, so it might be any one of them. HD set tops might have narrowed the range down quite a bit.
Verimatrix said when the deal was first announced that it provided the conditional access/DRM system, but apart from that no other suppliers have been publicly announced.
ZTE says it now has over 20 IPTV deployments globally and they collectively have 1 million set tops connected. That’s a pretty small footprint really compared to say Alcatel, which has been in the IPTV business for a long time, and which has some of its own installations as well as all of the Microsoft Mediaroom installations, which reached 3 million homes some time last year.
But ZTE’s says it is IPTV market share leader in Asia (We would have thought that UTStarcom and Alcatel both had more deployments there) but ZTE does boast deals such as Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the largest state-owned telecoms operator in India, and PCCW, the legendary IPTV pioneer in Hong Kong.
But this is the first step for ZTE in the South American market which it says has the potential for 126 million viewers. Well maybe there are that many TV viewers, but not that many Pay TV viewers, and most of those who take pay TV buy into DTH or cable services. The Venezuelan state-owned operator CANTV is targeting 1.26 million IPTV customers within the next six years.