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Minerva Goes for the Middle in IPTV Arena
02/01/2006
It’s been widely reported that some Tier 2 and 3 carriers were left in the lurch when Alcatel exited the IPTV middleware business last year as a condition of its relationship with middleware provider Microsoft TV. Of course, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. And this situation opened a door for middleware vendors such as Minerva Networks Inc. xchange Editor in Chief Paula Bernier recently spoke with Matt Cuson, director of product marketing at Minerva Networks, about how and why his company benefited from the fallout, how carriers stand to benefit from working with Minerva, and the great thing about mosaic.
XC: Minerva has been talking a lot lately about how it’s winning IPTV business from independent telcos that wanted to replace their “existing, unsupported middleware application” from Alcatel. What’s the story? MC: When Alcatel agreed to Microsoft terms to work exclusively together, it required that Alcatel stop all software/middleware development. Over the years Alcatel has acquired a number of companies in the software space for TV services. They had a product, iMagic, which was being resold by Tut Systems [Inc.], they do encoders. In fact, Tut resold that as iView. So when Alcatel discontinued all development, Tut no longer had a middleware offering. We’ve worked with Tut, in some ways we’ve competed against Tut, but we’ve worked with them in a number of deals where customers evaluated both iView and our iTVManager and selected iTVManager instead. And so we worked together with Tut there. But Tut has also a couple dozen of these customers where they’ve deployed. So those customers won’t get access to PVR, they won’t get access to HD, they certainly won’t get mosaic capability.
XC: Which customers won’t get access to that stuff? MC: The existing iView customers, because that software is not being updated to support all the new capabilities. So that software will not be able to support MPEG-4. So Alcatel sells to Tut, Tut sells to two dozen companies and those two dozen companies are left high and dry because their middleware now no longer has any future. So those customers are stuck. It’s like if you bought a Commodore in the old days, there’s no Commodore anymore, so there’s nothing new you can do on your Commodore system. So those customers are saying ‘I need HD. I need PVR. Where am I going to get it?’
XC: Why didn’t those customers just move to Microsoft’s middleware? MC: Two reasons. One, the Microsoft middleware just isn’t ready. They can’t buy it. Two is Microsoft wouldn’t sell it to them. They’re too small. Microsoft has been very, very clear that they’re only going after the biggest guys, and if you’re below a certain number of customers there’s just no way. There are just too many accounts out there and they wouldn’t be able to manage it, and they don’t even have their first product out yet. So their focus is on SBC [now AT&T] and some of the other big guys, and that’s consuming them completely. And some people say that they’re having a hard time hitting their milestones, though Microsoft assures everyone they’re on track.
XC: At Telco TV, Minerva announced that Allendale Communications, Polar Communications, United Telephone Co. and Westphalia Broadband Inc. had chosen to migrate to your iTVManager solution. Why was Minerva able to win those customers over its other middleware competitors? MC: One, we’ve got a lot of deployments. We’ve got the largest U.S. IPTV deployment – SureWest [Communications] here in California – by far, by at least a factor of two. It’s field-proven; plenty of customers out there have experience with it. [Minerva] is an independent company – Myrio [Corp.] being part of Siemens, [carriers] say ‘Siemens isn’t very strong in the U.S. in terms of their networking gear. They’re much stronger internationally.’ And [IOC customers] are concerned that Myrio isn’t going to be paying as much attention to them because, just like Alcatel and Microsoft are chasing the big guy, Siemens is a big guy. … There’s also the issue of being able to support their existing set-top boxes. If they were to change their existing middleware, they run the risk of having to throw out their investment in set-top boxes, which is not a good thing.
XC: Right, but getting a pre-integrated solution from a giant vendor like an Alcatel/Microsoft or a Siemens also seems pretty appealing. And it seems like Tier 2 and 3 service providers, which have far fewer engineering resources than the Tier 1s, could greatly benefit from a vendor that delivers an end-to-end IPTV solution. How does Minerva address that? MC: Well, actually, for a number of years we have been selling the headend as well as the middleware. While that was useful in the early days, what is apparent is this is such a complex system on the one hand that you want it all in one place where you can do the integration. But on the other hand, it is such a complex system because there are so many different pieces that have to work together that also require completely different areas of expertise. So there’s a lot you need to know about networking in the core. There are other things you need to know about networking in the edge. Then there’s the home premises device. There’s the set-box device. And the set-top box is chip plus operating system plus other things. Then there’s the conditional access. There is no one company – [although] Microsoft claims they can be – that is going to be able to do all that exceptionally well and do it in a way that allows for rapid innovation so that when you buy it … and it’s best-of-breed or the best solution available, that it’s not going to stay the best solution going forward. So it’s really a pick your poison. You can reduce your pain by getting it all in one, but then you’re kind of on that horse for good. And you better hope that whoever you picked sticks with it and doesn’t jerk you around and gives you what you need when you really need it. Or you can go with our approach, which is more open systems, best-of-breed, where we will accomplish the integration by having a robust set of APIs and documentation and relationships with the key partners to be able to define and drive some of the standards with the different components and their interactions, and then you now have the flexibility as a company to go out and buy. There’s still going to be linkages, right. We don’t support every set-top box in the world. We don’t support every single VoD server in the world. But if you want one, we can get it supported and eventually we’ll keep supporting more, the standards will become better defined and pretty soon it will be more or less plug-and-play like disc drives are today. So our approach is really one of ‘Just don’t close off the system; you run the risk of stifling integration.’ And this market is too new, too young to lock some of this stuff down. So we think it’s important to keep the innovation active and we will support the interchangeable parts into our platform by working with some of the leaders in the marketplace to make sure there is this feeling of plug-and-play. Let’s be honest, it’s going to be ugly for a while because this is just being invented and it’s extremely complicated, but these problems have been solved in the past and they’ll definitely be solved going forward. And I think we’re better off having a few more companies in the mix early on to keep that innovation alive, to hammer out what the difficulties are and not get in a rut in thinking of something in a single, monolithic way.
XC: Speaking of big companies, Minerva at the Telco TV show announced an alliance with Nortel Networks. What was that about? MC: We were announcing our relationship with Nortel, that they will be acting as a reseller of our middleware for the Tier 2 marketplace as part of their IPTV solution. We’re also, as part of that relationship, doing a joint development on integrating their unified messaging system on the TV – so being able to integrate the phone service as well as text messaging on the TV. And we were able to demonstrate that at Telco TV.
XC: You mean that enables the service provider to present TV viewers with screen pops when their phones ring, and stuff along those lines? MC: That’s what we currently support already, so that’s the basic caller ID. But basically extending that for the voice calls to be able to go into your log on your TV and be able to do click-to-call where it will dial the number and connect your phone with the destination phone. You don’t actually talk through the TV. The TV set-top box actually acts as an auto dialer. And you have that capability plus an address book accessible through your TV. But then it also extends the opportunity for what we were demonstrating – a user on a camera phone can send a picture to the set-top box and a user can then display that, and you could also reply with a text message or from the address book send a text message to someone, being able to incorporate basic presence information as well. So really integrating communication services from the set-top box through the Nortel unified messaging system on the backend and having it all work seamlessly together.
XC: You said you also used Telco TV to demonstrate proof-of-concept-type things to show the direction where we’re going. MC: One very popular one was mosaic. Microsoft has really pushed that pretty hard as being a new way of navigating on the TV, and we worked with Harmonic [Inc.] to support mosaic view on today’s set-top boxes. We believe we’re the first middleware company actually demonstrating that.
XC: What is mosaic? MC: Mosaic is the notion that rather than looking at a single channel and then a list of other channels … you might have four, six, eight, twelve thumbnails of the different channels showing live video. By mousing over each one you’re able to tune into the audio. By clicking on one it tunes into that channel. You see it with some of the cable channels today where they’ll put six channels up on the screen, and they’re all news channels, or six sports channels. Or they’ll have six kids’ channels. There are really two ways of using mosaic, as people think about it. The earliest implementation – longer term, obviously, it can change – is a service provider-defined mosaic, and that’s where the service provider finds a group of six channels that they want to be able to promote together. They’ll put that all on one and they’ll label it ‘news’. So if you just want to go and watch news you might get CNN and FOX and ABC and CBS, or whatever, and those are going to be your news channels.
XC: Why would I, as a consumer, want that? MC: You’re a news junky and you don’t have six TVs where you can tune to six different channels, but you want to be able to see what’s going on, especially with the sports and the football games. The other [reason] is it’s an alternative way of navigating. Rather than having to navigate through 200 channels to find your favorite six news channels, it puts it all in one place so you can quickly navigate. In some ways it’s like a favorites or a short EPG that is thematic. It’s all about how do you quickly get to the content that you want, and this is a method for doing that. Microsoft has popularized the concept. Cable companies are starting to deploy it. We’re actually the only one that can show it right now in the IPTV space.
XC: So is mosaic a Microsoft thing? MC: The concept of putting multiple thumbnail videos all on a single TV screen, like a picture-in-picture, that part isn’t new. But when Microsoft came into this space they pushed ‘it’s not just TV, it’s better TV’ or whatever it is. And this is one of the things that they showed as being one of the cool, great things for IPTV. The reason they were pushing it is, in the case of IPTV, what they really want to be able to go to is [a world in which] you can define which channels you want on that list. So rather than the current implementation where it’s hard coded by the service provider and everybody gets it, like it or not, the notion is over time the user should be able to say ‘Hey, these are my eight favorite channels. Show me my eight favorite channels.’
XC: I guess what I’m asking is, do Minerva and others have to license something from Microsoft to deliver this capability? MC: No.
XC: You said Minerva is the first middleware company in the IPTV space showing this, but if Microsoft came up with this concept, aren’t they also showing this? MC: Oh yeah, but they’re not shipping any products.
XC: So Minerva is the only one shipping products that’s showing this capability? MC: Yeah. This particular one is under development and will be shipping in our next major release. So we were able to demonstrate it, and what we were demonstrating is substantially what we’ll ship in the final product. We’re actually finished with the development; we’re just wrapping some other things around it to be able to release it.
XC: So when will the next Minerva software release, which will support this capability, ship? MC: We’re still working that out. We’re targeting beta customers in first quarter. And so, hopefully, shipments in the second quarter.
XC: So what does this new capability entail as far as your software is concerned? MC: Without getting into the technical nasties of how this works, at the headend there are channels being multicast out. They’re going out over the network. So what the service provider will do is … if they have 100 channels, they would make a 101st channel. They would take and create another channel as a composite of, say, six of their other channels. And they will use Harmonic equipment to take those six independent channels and composite them into a single channel. And what we do is we recognize that as a single channel, and we have to treat that differently when it gets down to the set-top box. So we’ve written our software when we see that 101st channel, and we know that it’s a mosaic channel so we invoke a part of our software that allows the user to navigate over those and to be able to do a channel change from there and to be able to do an overlay special graphic for that special channel.
ABC Inc.
www.abc.com
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