There's life in IPTV

Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2007/09/16/ibc_iptv_technologies/

IBC boasts new technologies and new entries

Posted in Networks, 16th September 2007 08:02 GMT

Analysis The key reason for Faultline to go to the IBC conference and exhibition in Amsterdam each year is to test the temperature of the entertainment industry, with its 47,000 visitors from over 120 countries and its 1,300 exhibitors. By any standards, but especially European standards, it is a big show.

It is of course many shows within a show. It caters for big broadcasting businesses and their remaining analog and expensive cameras, post productions systems and broadcast styles, while at the same time addressing IPTV, mobile TV and Digital Cinema.

Among the IPTV adherents for the past two years the entire show has given off an air of doom and gloom, with the domination of Microsoft in the tier 1 IPTV middleware space causing havoc and despair, to the extent that Microsoft never attended last year's event, feeling it would only encounter hostility.

But in 2007 there is a definite air of optimism in IPTV and mobile TV at the show, like there was three years ago, plus the arrival of various elements of web TV which some call internet video, and every company that has not yet fallen foul to the fairly rampant consolidation that occurred as companies like Cisco, Ericsson and Motorola entered the business, had something new on show.

There is always a cynic's view to take into account: and many people at the show were still concerned that few of the companies present, if any, make a profit yet out of IPTV. The age-old view, not quite dead, was that many companies were "still putting lipstick on the pig," which refers to the process of putting a small company's technology in the right light, hoping that it will attract a suitor and a takeover.

But in the main, the survivors of the 2004 IBC and the raft of new, optimistic entrants, were all showing something new, and showing it with enthusiasm. And given that Dreampark, the Swedish IPTV middleware firm that gatecrashed the sector as a one man start up in 2004, says that it is currently chasing 15 separate RPQs out in the market, means that everyone has some new business to fight for.

Fast Channel Change, which was the mantra that brought Microsoft Mediaroom (as we must now call it) to the fore, was not mentioned in our earshot for the entire week. The new buzz words seem to be "workflow" on the pre-production side, and various forms of EPG evolution on the IPTV side and watermarking on set tops. Addressable advertising is also increasingly brought up.

Orca

The sheer volume of announcements at IBC will mean that even if we write about them for a month we will miss out on some detail or other, but one of those that gave us the most pleasure was listening to Orca CEO Haggai Barel regain his enthusiasm for the show and the subject matter.

Orca is no longer thought of as a middleware leader and the larger players act as if it is already out of business, last September it announced that half year revenues for IPTV were down to just $900,000, compared to $3m the previous year. Most think that Orca is likely to be sold or is simply irrelevant, but the Israeli company was one of the early entrants to offer a full suite of IPTV middleware for IPTV, on the heels of Myrio, the company that was merged into Siemens, which now lives inside Nokia-Siemens.

This time last year Barel was bemoaning the fact that Microsoft had frozen the market and that his existing customers were finding it hard to attract end users, and he had to live on new client sign ups for any revenue at all, which were few and far between. But at this show he was announcing a wake for the EPG (the Irish idea of having a party for the departed), and showing instead what he called a Compass, which bundled the concept of a favorites list with a recommendation engine, to replace the standard grid that is the basis of TV channel selection virtually everywhere.

It is hard, without a full bouquet of several hundred channels to know how well the compass works. It is an L shaped set of screen icons that offer VoD recommendations up the screen and broadcast ones across the screen. A later version will allow a different compass for each person in the household, and if you don't like the set of recommendations on show you can refresh it with its second attempt or program it with a web interface.

The compass is called Orca's Content Discovery infrastructure and will be added to its RiGHTv IPTV middleware platform in the near future and comes out of academic research in Israel, which has been tuned by testing it on students there. It is the first output of the NeGeV consortium that was announced a year back which sees Israeli academics with $20m of funding from the Israeli government, working with Comverse, Scopus Video Networks, encoder specialist Optibase, SintecMedia, Orca Interactive, Mobixell Networks and VoD server specialist BitBand.

During the last year to 18 months Orca has only signed deals with Jazztel in Spain, Telrad Networks in the country of Georgia, and Completel, a French ISP as far as we can see, but recently opened up its system to offer web TV from its IPTV middleware, and signed a deal with Blockbuster in Israel.

Orca was also showing a system which takes a personal photograph and turns it into a short video, complete with music and graphical effects.

Consequently Barel, and the company looked ten years younger, and perhaps the previously jaded IPTV industry is beginning to take on an altogether younger feel once again.

Microsoft was back at the show with Joe Seidel, Director of the Worldwide Partner Ecosystem, Microsoft TV Division, telling us that it is in the process of opening up its IPTV eco-system to more and more partners, offering the MediaRoom Interoperability and Qualification Lab (IQ Lab) for digital video encoders.

Microsoft was heavily criticized when it started in IPTV, deciding to build middleware that used a weird unicast/multicast hybrid for fast channel change, insisting on CE as the operating system for its set tops and Windows as the server operating system. It ordered new set top chips and HD chips from just two suppliers, working with only standard server hardware makers and building its own DRM system. It looked to the world like it wanted to own the entire IPTV hardware and software stack without reference to the four years of experience that set top makers, VoD vendors and middleware players had already built up.

At the time Microsoft told us that it would eventually try to build a broad eco-system of suppliers but that even Microsoft had to put on its trousers one leg at a time and it would first make the system work with a limited number of set top makers (Scientific Atlanta, Motorola, Philips, Tatung and Thomson), two chip makers in Sigma and STMicro, server vendors IBM, HP and Sun with EMC on storage, and encoders mostly from Motorola's Modulus.

The first wide open door is at the encoder level and Envivio, Harmonic, Motorola, Tandberg and Thomson have already signed up for the IQ Lab, which means access to Microsoft test tools and consulting, and the various existing hardware that currently make up the Microsoft Mediaroom equipment in its installed base.

Microsoft says that every one of those encoder makers has one or more encoders in use at Mediaroom customers already.

Seidel also promised us that Microsoft would expand its silicon ecosystem beyond the Sigma 8630 and the ST Micro 7100 series, and that it would integrate additional CA/DRMs, pointing out that for hybrid Mediaroom DVB-T systems Nagravision was already supplying conditional access software.

But perhaps it is the fact that even today four years after its announcement, Microsoft Mediaroom is only powering 250,000 IPTV homes globally, with around 100,000 at AT&T, which has meant that other companies have had to fill the void.

Dreampark

Tiny Dreampark, which goes head to head with Orca, and has to also operate in the shadow left by Microsoft's middleware was a rejuvenated company at the show. It started life in web portals, built a user interface with government money in 2002, and was finally attracted to IPTV in a deal with Canal Digital in 2004. In 2005 it was voted best newcomer to IPTV, a fact that must have been helped by the fact that companies at that time were leaving the sector not joining, it may have been the ONLY newcomer.

New CEO ex-Ericsson man Per Skyttvall told us, "We now have 85,000 homes using our software, and we have 3 out of 4 IPTV installations in Sweden, 6 out of 8 in Norway and 3 out of 4 in Finland and Denmark." Now the company has 15 bids out, with only 2 or 3 of these in Scandinavia, it has system integrators appointed in Russia, Lithuania, Poland and the Netherlands, and says that it has a tier 2 Central European customer that it will reveal shortly, and it has integrations with Tilgin and Telsey in set tops, BitBand, Harmonic's Entone and Edgeware in VoD, Verimatric, Conax, NDS, Widevine in DRM.

Dreampark's biggest innovation at the show was to program its IP based DVR using a remote a handset and the ability to offer localized portals (TV screens) in different regions or even to every different home. It also announced Dreamlets, which lets operators put in place interactive applications such as voting on set-top boxes.

In fact interaction was perhaps another buzzword of the show, though most of it was targeted at using a mobile, and that arena was very much overshadowed when earlier this week Ericsson said that it would market to cellular operators, a system of voting and interaction that has been created by Endemol through its reality TV franchises. Ericsson will no doubt soak up oceans of interactive installations due to its dominance of UMTS base stations globally (see separate story).

Latens

Tiny Irish DRM supplier Latens was perhaps the only company at the show on the IPTV side talking about profitability. Sales and marketing director Andy Mathieson was cheerfully talking about the legal fight between two of his rivals Widevine and Verimatrix, which he sees as a fight to the death and the dying struggles of two companies which he says are reliant on venture backing rather than prudent deal making, for their survival.

Latens began life following the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) around Scandinavian IPTV operators where the MPAA was insisting on DRM being installed. Latens was offering to retrofit effective DRM onto their existing set tops. From there it has partnered with middleware supplier Minerva and landed some 60 small IPTV deals in the US. "All that talk about suing one another is just to create fear uncertainty and doubt (FUD) so that customers look elsewhere," he said.

"The DRM market has become one where everyone wants to know who is offering the cheapest system per user. Our way out of that is to widen our offering and we now have a stripped down, basic middleware of our own," he said. This offers broadcast TV and VoD, and has been taken up by one of the early and loyal Latens customers, Lyse Energi, one of the Norwegian energy companies that offers broadband services and IPTV. Lyse has now franchised this middleware offering to 22 other networks bringing a total of 100,000 set tops using it since its launch last year. Latens has also launched a downloadable DRM for the cable market, which complies with the FCC cablecard initiative, and said at the show that it had landed its first customer for this.

"People ask for free DRM and we just walk away, but if someone wants to try our middleware and our DRM, then we can afford to give one of them away cheaply and still cut a profitable deal," said Mathieson. One deal that he says Latens has just landed is the job to protect the pay service in Dubai internet city from operator du. Latens says that du was supposed to upgrade to the Microsoft Mediaroom, software but has changed its mind and needed to retrofit DRM to its own system, which he claims goes to 500,000 customers across the United Arab Emirates, although that seems a high number to us.

Secustream

There was even room at IBC this year, in the chosen DRM field of Latens, for a new approach from tiny company Secustream. This is really a three man company that hails from the University of Trondheim, in Norway, where encryption specialists have come up with what they think is a new way of arranging encryption protection for a video stream.

In essence it is an AES system with a 20 second cryptoperiod, where the private key is issued separately from a remote server. The system also carries out a random checksum, executed on the attached device, which can include both PCs and set tops. The checksum needs to be completed, and it will only be completed by the correct client configuration, which triggers the issue of a randomly generated private key. There is also an authentication every time this happens.

To us it seems no more secure than all the other AES based DRM systems on the IPTV market, but Secustream has applied for a number of patents, and who knows, its focus on protection for both PCs and TVs may mean that in a few years we visit IBC and find it has grown in the same way Dreampark emerged from a tiny player to one that is credible.

Microsoft's Interactive Media Manager

One of the core focuses of Microsoft was explained to us by Gabriele Di Piazza, Director Media & Entertainment, Microsoft Communications, which was the use of a Sharepoint derived Workflow system for managing the editing and playout of video, aimed at a distributed TV studio environment.

The system is called Interactive Media Manager and its was launched at NAB in the US earlier this year, and was being shown in Europe for the first time. Its console uses the lightweight Microsoft Silverlight to show where in the video edits are to be made, and to give a remote editor the sign-off capability to authorize final edits. Naturally, being a Microsoft system the company claims all the advantages of integration into security managed by Active Directory, and Outlook email for discussing the outputs.

"The system can manage ingest, search and browse, shot selection, distribution, transcoding, upload, review and approval workflow of any video asset," said Di Piazza, "It was developed with customers and is in use with both Warner Brothers and Liberty's Ascent Media Group, which makes about half of the TV commercials in the US, and it plugs into all the popular watermarking and security tools and uses the work on MPEG 21 for its underlying architecture," he said. MPEG 21 was supposed to be a global digital media protection and identity standard, but was never finished, with work grinding to a halt about 3 years ago, with the system part done.

As impressive as that sounded, the SAP of the media workflow world is Xytech, and although it is just a 60 person company, today it boasts 360 customers and Ron Peters, executive VP for sales and marketing there was quick to shake its head at the Microsoft claims. "Our system is a real asset manager and workflow system which works with both physical and digital media types. We are fed up with everyone writing a system which manages sign off and calling it a workflow system.

"We manage business workflow end to end. We maintain a metadata library system using 200 metadata fields, so that studios can find the tiniest piece of video from ALL of their assets. Once content is lost, it is lost forever. All the major studios, most of the newsgathering operations in the US and channels like the Golf Channel all use our system. CBS has 12 million piece of video on our system, from old files to unfinished assets, they operate playout from it, and video creation. They run their business on it. Take it away and their business would grind to a halt," said Peters. The entire system sits on an SQLServer or Oracle database.

"I don't want to say anything bad about Microsoft, we partner with then, but our only rivals are systems made up of ten components, glued together by the studios themselves. The issue is integration, and the Xytech system deals with output to any format automatically, it handles creation of the final video asset, handles cuts, transcoding and FTP into a professional content distribution system like Signiant or IBM's Media Hub.

The confusion all seems to come from the variety of definitions for the word workflow. Enterprise workflow is one thing, content creation another, distribution workflow yet another thing again.

Tandberg

Giant mobile infrastructure provider Ericsson, through its Tandberg subsidiary also entered the Workflow debate this week announcing that DirecTV will use the Tandberg WatchPoint Workflow system to manage it's new multi-platform on-demand service. The system will be used to deliver DirecTV content to set-tops, the web and to handsets in multiple formats such as H.264, Windows Media and Flash video across the US. WatchPoint is designed purely to offer crossplatform delivery.

This seems to be the first time that the workflow argument has sprawled across the floor of IBC, and it promises to be a subject that is revisited in future years. After all if Microsoft and Ericsson see a market worth going after, it must have sufficient revenue volume to attract them.

That discussion led us to a visit to the Signiant stand, where Avid legend Tom Ohanian was waxing forth on how its digital content distribution system came into existence. Essentially it is a Nortel project on securely distributing huge amounts of source code for overseas software development, which broke away in 2000 in a 50 man spin out, which decided the system was even better suited for digital media.

Signiant

Again that word workflow appears, with Ohanian, VP product management at Signiant talking about its Workflow Automatic Framework, but here he is talking about moving a piece of video to a storage volume, or to a transcoding engine, or to a distribution venue like a content delivery network. It also handles non-repudiation and proof of receipt of the media.

"The system is used daily by Cisco to back up the source code for its routers in one installation, which amounts to 12 million files and 72 terabytes of data," boasts Ohanian, "with 2 per cent to 3 per cent of that being change data every day." The system uses virtually any type of encryption from 64 bit to 156 bit keys, can use digital signatures, and PKI and X509 certificates and now it is focused on video, and it will work with Thomson Nextguard watermarking. It offers what it describes as a managed P2P delivery, with WAN accelerators, bandwidth management to ensure assets arrive on time and works from 25 Mbytes right up to uncompressed high definition files, which can be huge.

As far as we can remember it was Signiant's first time at the show, and a sure sign that Europe is ready for more and more video distribution as fragmentation in video markets heats up and there are more and more video types wanting to reach non-broadcast destinations (so not suitable for continuous satellite feeds), to feed 100s and 100s of consumer networks. Again another sign of life in IPTV, mobile TV and the emerging web video markets in Europe.

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