Competitors Challenge Microsoft for IPTV Opportunity

Whatever sense of dominance in IPTV Microsoft might have enjoyed earlier this year was swept away at SUPERCOMM as the field expanded to include other major vendors intent on gaining a piece of the multibillion dollar action.

The good news for service providers was that the new solutions on offer were distinct from each other and from those of Microsoft, ensuring that the emerging market will have ample latitude to experiment with multiple approaches to IPTV on the way to establishing a stable operating environment. These developments also provided service providers new options from major vendors with long-standing telecom experience, which served to mitigate the fact that Alcatel has chosen to back Microsoft’s MSTV platform rather than pursue the marketing of its own middleware platform.

One of the new big players is SeaChange International, a long-time supplier of video-on-demand hardware and software built on IP technology that has now added set-top middleware and other components to create an application platform enabling video applications to any IP-connected device, including mobile gear. Dubbed the “Multiverse Suite,” the open platform has already been integrated with set-tops from Amino, Kreatel, Motorola, Samsung, Scientific-Atlanta and Thomson and allows operators to deploy with several digital rights management and conditional access solutions, including SecureMedia, Verimatrix, Widevine and others.

The IPTV market is wide open from SeaChange’s perspective, says Joe Ambeault, the company’s director of broadband systems. “Time to market is everything to the telcos,” he says. “Our experience with telephone companies going back into the ‘90s allows us to bring them a solution pre-integrated into their network and operational environment. That helps us to get them turned on fast.”

Facilitating speed to market is a goal of Lucent Technologies, too, which is making a move into IPTV through a new partnership with middleware supplier Orca Interactive. The deal establishes a channel-selling relationship as well as a development strategy that is meant to leverage Lucent’s network strengths to enhance quality and control in the IPTV domain.

Lucent has integrated Orca's RiGHTv IPTV middleware platform into its network infrastructure solutions, 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 quality-of-service and service level agreements in IPTV operations, says Robert Piconi, vice president and general manager for broadband solutions at Lucent.

“Our strengths, tied to a deep understanding of both security and quality of service for carrier grade networks, represent key differentiators that are critical for our customers as they begin to deploy IPTV services,” Piconi says. "Working with Orca, a leader in IPTV middleware, we have a highly-scalable, market-ready solution that can be customized to meet our different customers' needs."

Still another approach to implementing IPTV was announced by VOD and media management software supplier Kasenna Inc. The firm’s PortalTV is a Web services-based turnkey application suite for delivering entertainment services over broadband networks that’s meant to minimize time to market for operators. The platform combines Kasenna’s MediaBase content delivery and LivingRoom video services systems into an integrated whole comprising a complete server, middleware and client environment, says Mark Gray, CEO and chairman of Kasenna.

“PortalTV enables an operator to get up and running quickly with value-added services branded with their own unique look and feel – and start generating revenue immediately,” Gray says. “When their business model allows, an operator can easily extend the TV portal to add more content and services.”

These developments follow on the heels of the recent acquisition of middleware supplier Myrio Corp. by Siemens, which is leveraging the platform as its own preferred solution while keeping Myrio free to work within other network system environments. This arrangement serves to provide Myrio much broader sales reach and deeper resources without restricting its marketability in any networking environment, noted Chris Coles, Myrio’s president, CEO and director.

“We’ve always operated on a vendor partner-neutral basis, and we will continue to do so as a subsidiary of Siemens,” Coles says. Already the teaming of the two players is paying off with several wins with large independent operating companies that have yet to be announced and several deals in the final closing stages with major PTTs, he notes.

As the field grows more crowded, Microsoft finds itself dealing with the publicity fallout from a decision by one of its initial announced customers, Switzerland PTT Swisscom, to delay for at least several months the rollout of commercial IPTV services through its Bluewin ISP subsidiary. In announcing the delay to sometime in 2006, Swisscom officials were quoted in the European press as saying the problem related in part to the timing of Thomson’s delivery of set-tops with integrated hard drives but that there were also problems with the Microsoft middleware.

Ed Graczyk, director of marketing and communications at Microsoft TV, says the Swisscom delay is not particularly meaningful in terms of his company’s timeframe for delivering a completed product suite to the market. “Our software is not done,” he says. “We’re on track with our schedule to deliver the completed code to our customers when we said we would, which is the end of 2005. We feel very good about where we are in the development process.”

Indeed, Microsoft showed no signs of slowing down, notwithstanding all the new competition and the Swisscom announcement. At SUPERCOMM, the software giant announced still another deal with a major telecom company, in this case the T-Online France subsidiary of Deutsch Telecom. The French-based competitor to the dominant carrier in that country, France Telecom, says it plans to roll out triple-play services, including video using the Microsoft middleware.

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