Talking to Viaccess CEO Fran’ois Moreau de Saint Martin this week at IPTV World Forum, he made it clear that the fight to get the software of its Orca acquisition into France Telecom has been an arms length one. Rivals were asked in to bid against the Orca Compass content discovery and recommendation system, he insists, and France Telecom really only has just agreed to use it.
What France Telecom will do with the system he is unclear about or at least cannot say, but it is our guess that the service could easily become a massive trigger, Europe wide for telco driven recommendation systems.
The point is that most rivals talk negatively about Compass, they knock it and either say they have something just like it, or that they co-operate with ‘all’ the existing recommendation engines out there, so that an operator can choose the one they want.
We’re not so sure that anyone this large has really chosen much in the way of recommendation engines for IPTV services in Europe, the US or anywhere in the world. And this deal could change all that.
Compass was introduced in 2007 by Orca with a big ‘Rest in Peace’ sign declaring the death of the EPG. Three years later the EPG lives on. Compass appears on the screen like a big ‘L’ and bundles the concept of a favorites list with a recommendation engine, which it hopes will replace the standard EPG grid that is the basis of TV channel selection.
The L shaped set of screen icons expand to offer VoD recommendations up the screen and broadcast ones across the screen. Other versions can offer a completely different compass for each person in the home, and recommendations can be refreshed or rejected, so that it learns or preferences can be keyed into a web interface.
There are probably better pieces of technology, because there is data everywhere which is relevant to our media tastes. There are PC tricks like looking at every media file on a PC to work out just what content you like; there are clickstream counters that look at every time the remote control is pressed and then calculates not only which programming you watched right through, but which programs (and adverts) you killed after two seconds by changing channel. There may even be algorithms that can look at the kind of videos and photographs you store on the home server to suggest content, but the combination of your favorites list working in the same way as your recommendation system is neat. It suggests that recommendations should have the same amount of pull as your favorites.
But regardless of the precise merits of the technology, it has been around for 3 years, it will have become more stable, even if it did not start out that way. More importantly, is just how France Telecom chooses to use it. Some decisions have the potential to change the way IPTV works everywhere.
France Telecom could choose to implement Compass as part of Orca’s overall middleware, called RiGHTv or it can put it on its existing SmartVision software, which is now managed by Technicolor, which it bought from Thales in 2005.
We don’t think that any decision has been taken yet for France Telecom to change its core middleware, and even if it had, it would almost certainly still have port the Compass software to Smartvision anyway, because it needs recommendations now and if it changes its middleware, it would do that too slowly.
Why do we say it needs recommendations now? Because in broadband saturated Europe, Over The Top video offerings are taking off and if you add more and more video to the already channel heavy IPTV services, there is just no other way to navigate them.
The Compass platform came out of academic research in Israel, tuned by testing it on students there, from the NeGeV consortium, which was given $20 million of Israeli government funding, shared between Comverse, Scopus Video Networks, encoder specialist Optibase, SintecMedia, Orca Interactive, Mobixell Networks and VoD server specialist BitBand, now part of Motorola.
Compass has been a hard sell though for Orca, with only a handful of takers, and having the largest IPTV operator in Europe take it up, albeit one that indirectly owns it, means that suddenly recommendation technology is mainstream.
France Telecom may introduce it piecemeal, a region at a time, and may introduce it while keeping its EPG alive, but it could eventually meant the death knell for EPG as far as France goes.
Orange is expected to use the system across the board, and given that it is one of the most prolific operators at offering multichannel streaming mobile TV, may even introduce it on a phone.
France Telecom also has converted a number of its customers to the underlying RiGHTv IPTV middleware of Orca. As we understand it, this has mostly been as a secondary system, used to introduce services in areas where the bandwidth requirements of its core IPTV service cannot reach ‘ mostly for customers too far from a phone exchange to get IPTV until now.
If France Telecom finds that the Orca software has any advantages over its original system, it could move, lock, stock and barrel to Orca, but would do this over a significant period of time we would expect. At present you have to ask why France Telecom did not go to a recommendation system offered by Technicolor, the new name for Thomson, which owns Smartvision. Perhaps disillusionment with the way the company has fared financially might have something to do with that.
Orca first found a role inside France Telecom when it worked on bringing VoD content to a France Telecom version of satellite TV service, across the public internet. To make this look more and more like a ‘real’ VoD service Orca created a form of push VoD over the network, using progressive download with some files already partially downloaded to a DVR so they could start playing immediately.
When that was launched the company talked about set tops issuing OMA DRM controlled content to handsets, and issuing decryption keys so set top content could be copied to phones. This service has yet to be brought to market, but is still expected.