iptv’s home court advantage

A wide range of facility, gateway and software options — many of them tied to new standards or group initiatives — were in evidence at the show, leaving no doubt the means are now at hand to enable porting of any type of content or communication in whatever format is appropriate to any type of device, including mobile and portable as well as home-based appliances. But to make it happen, service providers must take responsibility for creating a managed home networking environment for the residential user that overcomes the multitude of technical and cost hassles associated with do-it-yourself networking.

“I think service providers understand the opportunity at a high level, but I’m not sure they’re focused on it as a top priority at this point,” says Steve McKay, CEO of Entone Technologies Inc., a supplier of on-demand and home gateway IPTV hardware and software. “It’s important, though, because this is where working from an IP platform really gives you the opportunity to do things that are hard for cable to duplicate.” Anyone doubting the power of IPTV to shake things up in the video entertainment market would have been well advised to spend a little time visiting a small corner of the Ericsson exhibit at SUPERCOMM, where something called “Now TV” was on display. The application, which was developed to convince skeptics inside Ericsson that IPTV is something different, ended up making the point so well that the company now is planning to market it as an application on its network platform.

By clicking on the Now TV icon on the interactive programming guide (IPG) with their remotes, users can create a personal VoD channel that can be accessed by anyone on the IPTV network. Using the remote, the user can capture live or stored home video recordings and manipulate the captured stream in a variety of ways, including the transfer of recorded files to network storage for display in VoD mode or direct peer-to-peer transfer to another customer on the network. The viewer can add voting options for other viewers to exercise when viewing the video, resulting in a kind of personal “reality” TV program.

“Now TV is the customer’s private broadcast channel,” says Greg Kongalath, IPTV development manager for Ericsson. “People can do whatever they want with it. We just made this up for the show, but we’re finding network operators really love the concept. So it’s moving pretty fast to becoming a real product.”

The IPG used in the demo by Ericsson runs on TVs, PCs, mobile handsets and other devices using software provided by IPTV supplier Kasenna. The very-thin-client Kasenna software comes with a set of open application program interfaces (APIs) that allow other parties to customize their IPGs and add custom services like Now TV, says Greg Carter, vice president for partner, channel and OEM sales at Kasenna.

“Everyone’s iteration of our software looks different with varying types of applications and content packaging, but the underlying platform is the same,” Carter says. “We took a framework approach that provides a comprehensive way for service providers to differentiate their services from competitors.”

The ability to innovate and differentiate through integration of devices over the home network was a strong theme among all the IPTV vendors, including ones newly in the space such as Lucent Technologies. “We believe IPTV is just the starting point,” says Stef van Aarle, vice president for marketing and strategy at Lucent Worldwide Services. “This is not about merely replicating cable. We’re engaged in a fairly educational process where the message is about how to use IP solutions to create converged applications that add value to services.”

Lucent has teamed with software supplier Orca Interactive to deliver an IPTV solution that’s tightly integrated into Lucent’s network technology, including the Stinger DSL platform. Along with integrating the Orca software, Lucent has added a new set of Bell Labs applications and network elements that are meant to leverage the IP Layer 3 functionality of Stinger to provide support for QoS and SLAs in IPTV operations.

At the same time, Lucent, like other network vendors entering the IPTV space, is maintaining the flexibility to integrate with other IPTV suppliers, as is the case in a new contract with T-Online France, which has chosen Microsoft Corp. for the IPTV platform and the Stinger for the access side. “From an overall solutions perspective, the integration is 80 percent complete when a customer chooses our Orca-based solution,” van Aarle says. “The DRM (digital rights management), encoding and middleware components already are tied to the back office, so there’s an important speed-to-market advantage.”

Like other suppliers, Lucent is stressing the importance of converging voice with media applications so users can access both types on their TVs and mobiles and everything in between. For example, Lucent was showing how a video phone call could be ported to the TV set, allowing customers to see each other in a video window while continuing to watch their programs. Research with consumers is driving a lot of Lucent’s application development work, with “nanny cam” and “teen cam” home monitoring applications and something called “iLocator” showing especially strong appeal, notes Robert Piconi, vice president and general manager for broadband solutions at Lucent.

“iLocator tells parents where their kids are using the cellular network,” Piconi says. “It gives parents a tool to make sure the family rules are enforced.”

Lucent and many other suppliers are working with the applications integration technology known as IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem), which was developed for the mobile industry but now is making its way into wireline and cross-platform integration applications. IMS, which is defined in slightly different ways by the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telephone System) and CDMA2000, respectively, leverages SIP to support IP-to-IP sessions within and between any wireline or wireless network. (For more on IMS, see "Vendors: Follow the IMS Road".)

At Lucent, where its Bell Labs unit is devoting significant resources to IMS-related development, the three areas of integration pertain to linking everything together at the back-office level, on the user interface and via the network through implantation of IMS capabilities in network components. The last of these offers a significant savings over relying on all the end devices to support cross-platform integration, Piconi notes.

“By putting IMS features on the DSL platform, you make the process faster and more efficient,” Piconi says. In effect, by tying network-based IMS resources together with the IPTV middleware, Lucent creates a home network management support capability that mitigates some of the expense that would be required to make every device in the home SIP-compliant.

Motorola Inc., too, is busy creating IMS-based solutions for integrating applications with a focus on three profiles — network convergence, service convergence and device convergence, according to Eduardo Conrado, senior director for global marketing networks business at Motorola. Along with many communication-oriented applications linking the fixed and mobile networks, the company is working on the multimedia side through its Liquid Media Experience initiative.

“The idea is to control the delivery based on the device and where it is,” Conrado says. “The multimedia session follows you wherever you go, whether it’s your car, your office or somewhere else. The transfer of the session management ID can be triggered by GPS or a network-based locator. If you’re watching a game on TV at home and you go to the car, the audio portion comes on in the car, or, if you have a video player in the car, the video comes on as well. You get to the office and the session transfers to the PC. All of this is in the pre-commercial phase at this point.”

While such capabilities are at least a year or longer from entering the market, service providers have an opportunity now to ensure they’re positioning their IPTV, access and in-home networking platforms to accommodate such capabilities when they’re available. And, in the meantime, doing so will allow the service provider to leverage the IP technology for purposes of offering managed home networking services to the end user, in many instances building on what already has been done with home networking in the high-speed Internet access space.

A leading example of this migration is the SBC Communications Inc. strategy announced in January and now being implemented for commercial rollout to support home network integration of Web-based applications, DSL-based VoD and video content delivered via the EchoStar Dish Network service. The SBC service, employing set-tops supplied by 2Wire Inc. and the SBC Yahoo! user interface, supports distribution of digital video recorder content, music, photos and other multimedia to devices throughout the home.

While the carrier has not made any announcements respecting use of its IPTV platform to support a similar type of home networking experience, officials made clear this is where they’re going. “There’s no question that our ability to go beyond simply bundling services at the billing level to enable interconnection of applications across networks is a key advantage we intend to exploit,” says Amy Friedlander, senior vice president of programming at SBC Operations. “Just one example is the ability of the user to use a mobile device to control the DVR, which is something we’ll be doing going forward.”

Many recent developments supporting common approaches to the physical and component interface aspects of home networking have made it much easier for service providers to contemplate offering managed home networking services. For example, efforts to make installed coaxial cable a viable medium for IPTV have progressed to where it now appears most telcos will take advantage of the embedded household cable infrastructure in connection with extensions over other physical media, such as Wi-Fi, phone lines or power lines, to ensure ubiquitous connectivity throughout the home.

A wide range of field tests by the members of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) have demonstrated the technology, based on home networking software provided by Motorola’s newly acquired uCentric unit and semiconductor technology from Entropic Communications Inc., consistently delivers 100mbps of usable throughput under real-world conditions. Ahead of MoCA, which is supported by Cisco Systems Inc., Matsushita, Motorola, Toshiba and other suppliers, is the IPTV-over-coax system developed by Coaxsys Inc., which unveiled its TVNet IPTV-to-coax adapter in October and since has shipped units in volume to several dozen small ILECs and CLECs for early trials and some deployments.

“The cost of our unit is about $50 to $60, depending on the volume ordered, which cuts the cost of installing video to about $200,” says Gary Hoffman, business development manager for Coaxsys. “Fully integrated into the settop box this would add about $10 to the cost of a set-top.” Coaxsys is exploring the possibilities of such integration using its proprietary design with a variety of set-top vendors, Hoffman adds.

One of the first home terminals designed to accommodate delivery of IP video over coax is the Hydra IP Video Gateway from Entone. The Hydra can support connectivity of up to six TV sets with up to three streams running simultaneously over coaxial cabling without requiring any other set-tops in a home of up to 5,000 square feet in size, McKay says.

Still another solution combining hardware and software to support managed home networking services is the result of an alliance between Broadcom Corp. and Motive Inc. that was announced at SUPERCOMM. The two companies are working together to develop solutions based on the DSL Forum’s TR-69 management protocol, which enables gateways based on Broadcom’s systems-on-a-chip to be managed remotely by Motive’s Home device Manager software.

The standards-based approach will allow service providers to remotely activate and manage advanced voice, IPTV and data services over whatever home networking medium works for them, says Sanjay Castelino, vice president of industry marketing at Motive. “Our collaboration with Broadcom is a big step towards helping gateway vendors and broadband providers deliver these advanced services in the digital home,” he says.

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