Videonet - news, blogs and analysis for the pay-tv industry

• 22-Mar-2010 by John Moulding
• IPTV World Forum 2010 preview
• IP Television

IPTV World Forum opens its doors on Tuesday and is hitting the right notes for the IPTV community with its focus on hybrid broadcast and IP developments and on minimising Opex and enhancing the home experience. The mobile TV sessions starting on Day Two look increasingly at home in a conference aimed primarily at Pay TV and triple-play service providers, given the surge in consumer demand for mobile video and the increasing importance of delivering a multiplatform offer.

Keynote speakers on Day One include Richard Halton, Director, Project Canvas, BBC and Programme Director IPTV for the BBC, and Richard Young, Business Development Director for BT Vision. Terry Denson, Vice President, Programming and Marketing for Verizon FiOS TV is another keynote and with three million TV customers since its IPTV launch in 2004, Verizon is well qualified to discuss the future of this platform. On Day Two you can hear from another IPTV pioneer when George Penalver, Senior Executive Vice President, Strategy and Development for France Telecom, takes to the stage.

There is no mystery to IPTV anymore but this platform is still faced with some unique challenges that justify a conference and exhibition of its own. These include the continued need to differentiate services. Alternative broadband providers and telcos were late into the Pay TV market and have had to fight incredibly hard from day one to acquire new customers so service innovation is, not surprisingly, a key theme for 2010. There is a Service Innovation stream that runs across both days of the show.

Plenty of time has also been set aside to discuss over-the-top video and connected TV including a free ‘workshop’ session on Thursday called the ‘Connected TV Developer Jam Sessions’.

This conference and exhibition has evolved into a wide-ranging event without losing its core IP-centric, service provider relevance and has long been a valuable addition to the industry calendar. Videonet will be publishing daily newsletters from the show and conducting video interviews so watch out for our show editorial over the next few weeks. Here are some of the early details of what to expect from vendors:

Addressing the needs of both incumbent telcos and alternative operators running bandwidth-constrained or unmanaged IP networks, Netgem will launch next generation smart phone remote control applications and over-the-top content services to its hybrid NetgemTV IPTV technology.

Netgem has 2.5 million HD IPTV set-top boxes currently installed in France and elsewhere customers include Telstra of Australia, Monaco Telecom, Elisa in Finland and Algeria Telecom. The company will use the show to present its full range of innovative hybrid broadcast/broadband IPTV solutions. Managing Director Christophe Aulnette will contribute to a panel session on “Delivering Hybrid IPTV Solutions” at 1455 on Tuesday, March

TV Genius will launch its 3-screen Content Discovery Platform on its IPTV World Forum debut. The company says it enhances the TV experience with personalized search that provides relevant recommendations across TV, mobile and the web, leading to higher ARPU and reduced churn.

Accedo Broadband will be demonstrating its App Store Solution for IPTV, which is now compatible with SVG and Flash. SVG and Flash are becoming increasingly popular with operators as an alternative to standard browser solutions, offering them smooth animations and transitions and an attractive user interface. The company expects to see SVG and Flash platforms widely deployed in the next year.

Exterity is using the show to launch its first DVB-T2 TV gateway product to complement the company’s existing line of building IPTV products. Building IPTV utilises excess capacity on an organisation’s IP network to deliver live TV and video to a virtually unlimited number of users on the network. This technology is being used in education, hospitality, corporate, venues, transportation hubs, broadcast centres and more.

AirTies will be previewing its new DVB-T/IP hybrid set-top boxes that are compliant with the HbbTV standard for converged broadcast and broadband entertainment services: the Air 7320 and the 7334 set-top boxes. The company is also showing the Air 7130 PVR. The new STBs will be shown supporting wireless IPTV, web TV, VOD, HTTP streaming, progressive download applications and DTT reception.

AirTies is also showcasing its wireless home media network, featuring its range of self-provisioning set-top boxes and wireless access points linked wirelessly with VoIP phones, printers, PCs and storage devices, all in a simulated home environment.

Harmonic’s convergence suite for TV, PC, over-the-top and mobile video will be on display alongside the company’s Rhozet universal transcoding solution and a hybrid IP headend powered by Electra, ProStream and ProView products. Visitors to IPTV World Forum can also see demonstrations of the company’s contribution and distribution solutions, including low-latency Ellipse encoders and ProView HD/SD MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) integrated receiver/decoders. Visitors can also see the Electra 8000 multi-channel, multi-format HD/SD compression platform.

Thierry Fautier, Senior Director of Convergence Solutions at Harmonic, will speak at the “Leadership Insight: The Realities of Mobile TV” session on Wednesday, March 24, at 1140.

Advanced Digital Broadcast (ADB) will demonstrate its latest hybrid IPTV innovations. The company has recently been highlighting its ability to create connected home solutions that give consumers access to more content in more places. Telekom Austria recently announced that it has introduced advanced connected home capabilities on its aonTV IPTV service using ADB’s set-top devices and software technology. Innovations there, on the new aonTV MediaBox service, include the ability for subscribers to view DivX content on their TV.

ADB is also showcasing its Smooth-View DVR solution that provides understandable audio during fast-forward mode. Francois Pogodalla, CEO of ADB, will address the Hybrid & Broadcast Session and discuss how telecom operators can make IPTV a successful business proposition with a renewed focus on connecting people and content with the use of advanced technologies.

Ericsson will showcase its latest TV solutions including video processing products, video monetization, IPTV network infrastructure, connected home, IPTV multimedia solutions and mobile TV. The company will introduce Ericsson End-to-Endless Television (E2E TV) as its main theme at the event. The company says this “redefines the concept of being an ‘end-to-end’ partner by uniquely aligning consumer demand, technology enablers and business reality.”

Dr. Giles Wilson, CTO, Solution Area TV, Ericsson, is delivering a ‘Hybrid Approaches with IP&TV’ Plenary Keynote session on Tuesday, March 23 at 0900.

Appear TV will demonstrate its range of advanced IPTV headends and service reliability solutions that enable IP network operators to deliver high quality TV services. And Ruwido will show its range of input devices such as remote controls and keyboards, which are designed to enable consumers to access a richer, more interactive digital TV experience.

Witbe is highlighting its role in helping Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV providers to ensure subscriber satisfaction by providing key performance indicators such as: channel changing times, menu response times for the User Interface, performance and availability of VOD and DVR assets, and video and audio quality using a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) based on an analysis of the actual video and audio signals coming out of the set-top box.

Alcatel-Lucent is also at the conference/exhibition, having recently announced that Telekom Austria has adopted the Alcatel-Lucent Triple-Play Service Delivery Architecture (TPSDA), which is designed to bring smaller communities the same triple-play services today provided to customers in larger metropolitan areas. This solution is said to provide the bandwidth, scale and service awareness required to support the growing market for more personalized broadband services such as the Telekom Austria aon TV IPTV offering.

Akamai and other CDN providers are going to have an increasingly important role to play in the television business moving forwards, and the company is exhibiting at IPTV World Forum this week. Akamai is at the heart of online video delivery, which is increasingly moving onto the television, a development that could lead to some online/Pay TV partnerships. The Akamai HD Network massively increases bit rate capacity for over-the-top video but also introduces multi-camera angles and PVR-type functionality for video streaming.

Akamai is a leading player in enabling the online movie distribution business. EPIX, Netflix and Roxio CinemaNow are among those companies delivering HD quality movies on Akamai’s distributed edge delivery network (EdgePlatform), which is specifically tuned for optimal delivery of HD files online. Traffic across Akamai’s network associated with the delivery of full-length feature films has seen triple digit growth since November 2009. Akamai thinks this represents not only an increase in consumer consumption but the fact that more content is being migrated onto its platform.

The HomeGrid Forum is using the show to promote and showcase ITU-T G.hn technology, which it says has made substantial progress towards completion “and has established itself as the standard for next-generation wired home networking”. The organisation is hosting two seminars on G.hn to help service providers and network equipment manufacturers understand what is necessary to deploy the technology, with speakers from BT, DS2, Intel, Lantiq, Sigma and others. The first products based on G.hn were recently announced and HomeGrid Forum and its member companies will demonstrate prototype devices at the show.

Latens , which is exhibiting at the show, and Coship have announced that they will work together to create solutions based on Latens software conditional access and ECO Middleware and Coship’s range of set-top boxes. Latens says the cooperation will result in a highly secure, enhanced delivery of Pay TV services across cable IPTV and Hybrid networks.

Last year EchoStar Europe used IPTV World Forum to enter the IPTV market with the HDX-600 series DVR, an HD, MPEG-4 AVC device with hybrid functionality. The company also illustrated the benefits of integrating SlingLoaded technology into set-top boxes, allowing consumers to ‘Sling’ (place-shift) content to connected devices in numerous secondary locations.

The strong focus on multiplatform TV developments since then has made integrated place-shifting a potentially valuable option for service providers to offer their subscribers, in terms of both customer satisfaction and possible new revenues. Echostar Europe points out that through SlingLoaded, consumers can watch TV from any location inside or outside the home, on any Sling-enabled device including mobile phones, laptops and ancillary television sets.

At Cable Congress recently (a show for the European cable market) the company was demonstrating a retrofit option that enables Pay TV providers to introduce Sling place-shifting capabilities after set-top boxes are already in the field.

Find out more about IPTV World Forum here.

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