Minerva Expanding IPTV Features Through Nortel, Other Affiliations

IPTV vendor Minerva Networks is moving to strengthen its market position through a deeper relationship with Nortel and several innovations aimed at enhancing user options, including one still in development that would allow media companies to directly offer personalized on-demand services to consumers.

Minerva, which has been partnered with Nortel as a middleware supplier for Nortel’s IPTV customers, has now entered into a more formal reseller arrangement with the supplier that includes collaboration on development of new communications applications for the TV set. At the same time, the software company says it is adding “embedded” security integrated into its iTVManager platform from Lantens Systems and working with other partners to create new features in advertising, mosaic-screen presentations and personalized viewing experiences.

“We’ve been working with Nortel a long time, along with other companies in this space,” says Matt Cuson, director of product marketing. “This expanded relationship allows them to offer a more focused solution to customers. We’re active with several of their accounts, in some cases where they’ve brought us in and in others where we already were selected independently of the Nortel relationship.”

The Nortel-Minerva relationship follows a pattern that has developed across the network systems vendor and IPTV middleware sectors, where collaborations between Lucent Technologies and Orca Interactive, Siemens and Myrio, and Ericsson and Kasenna have strengthened the smaller middleware companies’ ability to compete against the Alcatel/Microsoft combination. In the case of Siemens, the relationship with Myrio led to the vendor’s acquisition of the IPTV provider this past summer.

Minerva and Nortel are working on integration of Minerva’s TV set-top management software with Nortel’s Multimedia Communications Services, which is a platform designed to integrate voice and messaging features across multiple devices. “We already support caller ID on the TV, and now we’ll be able to add capabilities such as call initiation from the TV and displays of text messages,” Cuson says.

Separate from the Nortel deal, Minerva has also been working with an unnamed media company to provide a means of connecting the content company’s point of service origination directly to end users through Minerva’s middleware. The idea is to offer viewers an option to connect with the media company’s server, providing the media company the ability to offer personalized advertising, viewing options and other components independently of the local service provider’s user interactive support mechanisms.

“We’ve developed interactive applications with this company where, when content is ordered by the user, we connect our interface to their server, allowing that server to take charge of the viewing experience,” Cuson says. “They’re very close to rolling this out, and we would follow that with preparations to release these capabilities as a product. The technology is completely done at this point.”

Such arrangements would require peering agreements between service providers and content suppliers to provide an entry point into the service provider’s IPTV service stream, but it would open opportunities for service differentiation that might not otherwise be available to the local service provider. “Everybody wants to own the viewer,” Cuson says, noting that the traditional approach involves a three-way agreement among content owners, advertisers and broadcasters that force feeds the same thing to everyone. “Now the approach to viewers can be more nuanced with innovations and personalization adding to viewer choice with a variety of business models defining the user-provider relationships.”

Techniques like Minerva is developing would allow advertisers as well as content companies to establish direct personalized interactions with end users, Cuson adds “Big advertisers like Proctor & Gamble, Ford and Budweiser are spending tremendous sums of money creating content,” he noted. “In the IPTV space that content doesn’t have to be flattened into 30-second segments at fixed slots in the TV programming stream.”

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