Orca Interactive, one of the original IPTV middleware pioneers is readying an IPTV Web TV integrated system for showing at this year’s IBC exhibition in September. Orca says that already Blockbuster Israel is taking a service built around its Web TV component.
Orca was hit by the slow market in IPTV rollouts for the past two years as Microsoft stole all the headlines and its customers found the going tough. Now it seems that a dual strategy of making its RiGHTv product line handle both a closed operator controlled IPTV environment and a PC delivered Web TV service over the public internet, is how it has decided to get around that problem.
In our view there are unlikely to be many operators that want to offer both IPTV and Web TV together, and it is likely that Orca will find most customers wanting one or the other and it may find itself with a whole new slew of customers in the niche content and user generated content (UGC) world.
The new WebTV offering includes progressive download and push VOD capabilities to either PCs or set tops and will use the same connectivity software to link to OSS/BSS systems as the IPTV system.
Blockbuster has been experimenting with video downloading services and recently bought Movielink in the US, but in Israel it will launch the Orca based service by the end of the year and in early 2008, plans to offer its own set top to view the internet delivered content directly on a TV and add advanced services such as Push VOD and HDTV.