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October 2007 | Volume 10 / Number 10
Feature Articles

IPTV is Here!

By Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

After endless tests and a few hit-and-miss trial deployments, IPTV is now gathering steam and is appearing in various places around the world. Welcome to the interactive, high-def future. You’ll never run home to watch a TV show at a certain scheduled time ever again. Indeed, you may watch it on your mobile device, or instruct your digital video recording feature to capture it, or your IPTV provider may already have done that for you, allowing you to click on and play an episode from a list of hundreds of them once you get back to your home, hotel or office.

One of the key components that makes IPTV work is middleware. Microsoft’s efforts in this area immediately come to mind, but there are other, smaller innovative players out there too. For example, Espial (http://www.espial.com) delivers IPTV middleware that manages IPTV applications along with subscriber interactions between the set-top box and the network. Espial also offers such video applications as electronic program guides, Video-on-Demand, interactive content portals, web browsing, PPV and more.

Espial’s Vice President of Marketing, Brian Mahony, says, “I think we’re all moving beyond basic IPTV deployments. And we’re already starting to see operators looking at differentiating via new services, which is really something they must do to set themselves apart from traditional broadcast TV. We’ve made some recent announcements such as our enhanced DVR [Digital Video Recorder] service, which includes ‘start-over TV’, so if you missed the first 20 minutes of your favorite show you can push a button and watch the show from the beginning. IPTV needs to address sophisticated users that want the full-featured capabilities of DVR but it also needs to cater to the less sophisticated users that want simple applications they can understand and from which they can derive value.”

“We’ve also demonstrated remote mobile convergence - remote control of your DVR from your mobile phone,” says Mahony. “We can also do ‘time-shift TV’, which is more of a Video-on-Demand type of model where the operator has stored in the cloud the past days of popular shows and you can watch them anytime you want, as opposed to a conventional DVR where you have to personally program a recording in advance.”

With the rise of Video-on-Demand [VoD], one wonders whether people will ever bother sitting in front of a TV at a particular, scheduled time ever again.

“The reality is that the success of IPTV largely depends on new ways to view existing content, not just new content,” says Mahony. “Increasingly, there’s a separation between the time the content is first available at first broadcast and the times when people actually want to view it. That separation is important to people because it gives them the flexibility to decide how it fits into their lifestyle. DVR, time-shift TV, start-over TV, mobile convergence - all of these are ways to get more control and more flexibility relating to how subscribers experience the content.”

Beam My Content Down, Scotty

2Wire (http://www.2wire.com) provides telecom carriers with broadband products, software, and service platforms enabling an integrated triple play of networked data, voice, and media services. Their portfolio includes residential gateways, broadband multimedia set-top boxes, remote management systems, and call center customer support.

Wes Hoffman, Executive Vice President of Media for 2Wire (http://www.2wire.com), says, “We’re better known for a product we refer to as a residential gateway. It’s the bridge point between the telephone line on the outside of your house and broadband connectivity inside the house. 2Wire provides gateways for AT&T U-verse suite of services for their Project Lightspeed. We’re the gateway provider for getting the bits from the side of the house into the home, and in AT&T’s case, to a set-top box that obtains its content from Microsoft servers.”

2Wire’s HomePortal 3000 series residential gateway supports fiber-to-the-premises and VDSL technologies. The residential gateways essentially create a home network that delivers IP-based services throughout your home, such as IP-based video, high-speed Internet access and ultimately VoIP service. The 2Wire also offers the MediaPortal platform, which combines broadband services and satellite TV programming to complete the triple play of voice, data, and video services. The MediaPortal is a hybrid solution suitable for service providers having existing satellite TV partnerships. It enables services such as multi-room digital video recording, Internet video-on-demand [VoD], music management, and photo sharing. Its remote access capabilities enable subscribers to use any web-connected computer to record TV programs and access photos, music, and computer files while away from home.

“2Wire has also expanded its role into the house with the MediaPortal, which is also marketed by AT&T as HomeZone,” says Hoffman, “which is a hybrid product. It gets its linear services from satellites, not IPTV, avoiding the last mile bottleneck, and yet it has the capability to receive movies, music and photos from a broadband connection over the Internet. AT&T views our residential gateway for U-verse and the MediaPortal as being complementary simply because ‘pure IPTV’ will be distributable to only about 50 percent of AT&T’s customers over a fairly substantial period of time and they wanted a TV-based product for their other customers. We recently ported our HomeZone software to an EchoStar box, which will continue to be marketed under the name of HomeZone, but the maker is EchoStar.”

“So we’re quite involved in pure IPTV initiates, and I think the trend we’ve seen over the past year is that the definition of IPTV has been expanded quite a bit,” says Hoffman. “Initially, IPTV is exactly what AT&T is doing with U-verse; it’s really a pure IPTV play, and we would have said that HomeZone is not an IPTV product, it’s a hybrid product. But as that started to get some traction and actually looked like it might be successful, at least in the eyes of Wall Street, many other telcos have come back to Wall Street with a HomeZone-like market proposition. They want to use similar hybrid boxes that receive linear video content from satellites or off-air sources, and has a broadband connection for other services to the subscribers. They refer to that as ‘IPTV’ too, which expands the definition. So we think we’re in a very nice position.”

“A hybrid solution such as ours makes sense because many IPTV initiatives today are struggling to figure out how to get two simultaneous HD streams to the home over a last mile link,” says Hoffman. “So a hybrid solution makes sense as IPTV networks build out over the next two or three years as we wait for the cost for that build-out to become more predictable. The architecture will be more scalable and it will be possible for some of the smaller operators to really take a serious look at pure IPTV. But until that happens, until one of the big guys like AT&T really proves the economics of it, that’s a big expense for some of these smaller telcos. And because of that, the little guys will look to the hybrid solutions to reduce the capital costs of creating a pure IPTV network.”

Over at ADVA Optical Networking (http://www.advaoptical.com), Paul Morkel, Senior Director of Business Management, Carrier Optical, says, “We’ve got a fairly unique presence in the market that’s very strong, historically, on the European side, in the metro WDM space. Recent investments have been driven by triple play services and IPTV in Europe. We’ve been deploying a lot of back-haul networks for IP DSLAMs, for various PTTs and smaller carriers in Europe. We typically deploy solutions that are based on CWDM [Coarse Wavelength-Division Multiplexing] an intermediate technology that has a capacity greater than WDM and smaller than DWDM, that we use for Gigabit Ethernet backhaul from IP DSLAMs to central offices.”

“They don’t have a lot of cable plant in Europe, and clearly the PTTs are dominant in terms of connectivity in the last mile,” says Morkel. “DSL technologies have been the only real vehicle, as far as I can tell, that have been looked at seriously for delivering on-demand content to end users. There is some cable presence in the U.K., where there’s a fair bit of HFC [Hybrid Fibre-Coaxial], but Europe is still very much dominated by DSL last mile delivery mechanisms. Still, there’s a lot of interest in IPTV and the CWDM backhaul component that we provide.”

“Translating that across the pond, clearly with AT&T, BellSouth and their deep fiber initiatives, they’re looking to do very much the same kind of thing in terms of deploying IPTV for triple-play services,” says Morkel. “But the drivers are different here in the U.S., since there is competition with the cable MSOs. We’ve seen quite a bit of investment that has taken place, mostly in the core thus far, by Verizon and AT&T in terms of supporting their video initiatives. The ‘second mile’ from the edge will also undergo capacity expansion to handle the additional bandwidth needed by the IPTV initiatives.”

“Interestingly, the MSOs don’t ‘need’ IPTV at the moment, because they already can deliver a great deal of bandwidth to end users,” says Morkel. “Even so, they’re looking to implement IPTV anyway to makes the most efficient use of what bandwidth they have. This is a common message. We hear it from Verizon; even though they have a fiber-to-the-home initiative, they’re looking at IPTV for implementing cost efficiencies in terms of reducing the number of wavelengths, but also in terms of personalization. The IPTV model affords great opportunities for personalized content, advertising, and so on, that the traditional broadcast model just doesn’t support.”

Coming: The Internet TV Box

Amino Technologies (http://www.aminocom.com) designs and delivers electronic systems, software and consultancy for IPTV (telco triple-play applications), on-demand video and in-home multimedia distribution. Their AmiNET series of IPTV set-top boxes (generally loaded with their IntAct IPTV software stack) and gateways are deployed in the telcom, broadcast and hospitality markets. Under its IntAct brand name, Amino licenses hardware designs together with the IntAct IPTV software to OEMs.

Rick Sailor, Vice President, Sales, Americas for Amino, says, “We were founded in 1997 in Cambridge, England. One of the first IPTV projects we had was when we were directed by Ericsson and Nortel to come up with a software decode stack for IPTV, residing on a single chip. It took us about a year to put that together. They said it was a great software stack, but now they needed a piece of hardware to run it. So that’s how Amino got into the hardware business. We designed the AmiNET 103 and the 110. The 103 won the Red Dot Design Award in 2003 for all of Europe for CPE equipment. So we started manufacturing the 103 and in just under three-and-a-half years we’re now just short of having deployed 1.1 million set-top boxes worldwide. We’re twice been rated the Number One IPTV set-top maker in the world by ABI Research, not just because of volume, but because of the versatility of our software stack and our ability to integrate with the products of various middleware an encryption companies, and VoD servers.”

“Most of the market has relied on the MPEG-2 codec. We were the first company to put the MPEG-2 Standard Definition and High Definition stacks on single chips. We also were the first with MPEG-4. We’re now in the process of debuting our new MPEG-4 Standard-Def and High-Def boxes. Other vendors have come on board and the new chips can handle everything: MPEG-2/MPEG-4 and Standard Def/High Def. Our upcoming AmiNET 125 will be the Internet version of our set-top box. We’ve got it running Windows Media 9 right now and we’re playing with Flash 7 but it looks we’ll be rolling the box out with Flash 8 on board at the end of 2007. This will give us an Internet play for set-top boxes. In the U.S. we have about 125 to 130 different phone companies and service providers that use our set-top boxes to do IPTV today. We’re also talking with some ISPs and other specialized content providers about our providing a specific Internet-based set-top box.”

Number Two Always Tries Harder

ECI Telecom (http://www.ecitele.com) is a major supplier of networking infrastructure equipment for the world’s carrier and service provider networks. They are also a leading worldwide IPTV access network vendor.

Gil Ilany, Director of Broadband Solutions in ECI’s Corporate Strategy Office, says, “ECI is Number Two in enabling IPTV lines in the world. We’re second only to Alcatel Lucent. In the past five years we’ve gained a lot of experience in networks that can deliver IPTV, along with the Internet and VoIP. For this we have our Broadband Access Division. It develops and markets the access and infrastructure equipment such as IP DSLAMs. We can deal with networks of any size or topology.”

ECI has created an extensive end-to-end infrastructure solution that supports high bandwidth, multicasting, policy control and subscriber management that will suit just about any service provider roll-out plan, network layout and demographic. ECI offerings appear in the areas of access, metro aggregation and the network edge. Their XDM platform provides an optimized metro aggregation bandwidth implemented over Ethernet, with drop-and-continue multicast with an MPLS point-to-multipoint (P2MP) tree for IPTV service delivery. This allows service providers to provide more channels over the metro aggregation network. ECI’s Hi-FOCuS series of access platforms can provide broadband pipes to businesses and residences using xDSL and fiber access, from the CO and/or from street side cabinets, connecting them with Ethernet and ATM uplinks. At the residence, ECI’s B-FOCuS series consists of home CPE modems, fiber ONTs and modem routers with Ethernet hubs, NAT firewalls and more. Subscriber management and bandwidth control can be achieved with ECI’s ST-series of multiservice routers that also handle access aggregation.

The thought of calling up one of thousands of high-def programs with a single click is a bit scary. Won’t we all spend more and more time exploring the vast repositories of past entertainment and documentaries? I’m reminded that Thomas Edison refused to develop television technology, since he thought it would be “the world’s biggest timewaster”. Perhaps he will finally be proven correct. IT

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

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