payback time for iptv middleware?
TRANSCRIPT
IPTV operators have not,
until recently, been well
served by their
middleware. This was not
always the fault of middleware
vendors, reflecting more the
fragmented nature of IPTV, and
uncertainty over how it will evolve.
“IPTV has many variants, and services
are provided by a wide variety of different
players, including ISPs, incumbent telcos,
some content providers, and even a few
retailers,” says Sefy Ariely, marketing VP at
Orca, the IPTV middleware market's first
major entrant in 1998. Ariely is, needless
to say, apologising for other vendors'
middleware rather than his own, but his
point is that the field has been challenging
because of its rate of change and lack of
clear definition. By contrast, the cable TV
and satellite fields have been relatively
stable with more clearly defined
infrastructures and business models.
Middleware vendors in these fields
have come into IPTV and had to adapt
as they go along, often at the expense
of operators during trials of their
products, according to Venkat Krishnan,
director of IPTV solutions at Sea Change,
a leading vendor of video servers
and also middleware spanning all forms
of pay TV. “Our CEO, Bill Styslinger,
accurately points out that most of our
competitors have little experience
in video, and are essentially learning
as they go at the expense of the
operator,” says Krishnan. “He calls
these exercises 'gold plated
trials' that have little chance
of making money.”
The field certainly is hot at the
moment, attracting new entrants
at a breathtaking rate given the risk
and effort involved, with around 30
recognised players. A shakeout at some
stage is inevitable as trials migrate into
full-scale deployments, but this point
in the trajectory of IPTV has not yet
been reached. Operators, therefore,
need to be wary, given that their
ability to deliver compelling services
will depend on the flexibility of their
middleware, and the vitality of the
vendors themselves.
It is significant that some of the larger
telcos originally developed their
own middleware because they lacked
confidence either in existing products
to scale, or because the vendors were
deemed too small to trust with such
an important piece of the delivery
infrastructure. Yet in most cases the
telcos have either disposed of their
own middleware, or in effect outsourced
it. BT developed middleware, but gave
up on it, electing to ride with Microsoft's
IPTV Edition, now rechristened
Mediaroom, as its BT Vision IPTV project
took shape. Telefonica in Spain had also
developed its own middleware called
Imagenio, but took a different line, selling
the software to Lucent, now Alcatel-
Lucent, in April 2006, after deciding it
was beyond its resources to maintain it
and keep pace with the fast evolving
requirements. But at least Telefonica kept
faith with its middleware. For this reason,
Alcatel-Lucent welcomed Imagenio with
open arms, gaining a large captive
audience for the middleware among
Telefonica customers, as well as the
potential for marketing it to other service
providers.
In one respect, consensus has now
been reached among both service
providers and operators, over the
requirements of middleware. Perhaps
the first point is that the name
middleware itself has become
inappropriate, although with little idea
what to call it instead. Vendors have
come up with their own cosy names,
such as Kasenna's Living Room, and
Microsoft's Mediaroom.
The term middleware was coined in the
IT data centre world, where middleware
really was the software layer between the
client and back-end services, enabling
Web-based applications to tap into legacy
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Advances in IPTV middleware are helping to improve the userinterface, but providing intelligentsearch remains a challenge, says Philip Hunter
Payback time for IPTV
middleware?
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databases for example. But in the case
of pay TV in general, and IPTV in
particular, middleware is also responsible
for the client side, both to locate services
and also control access. It will have
to handle DRM as TV services
increasingly penetrate beyond the set
top box to access multiple devices
in home networks.
Coping with scaleYet the first requirement is clearly
scalability, both in terms of consumer
numbers and also volume of content.
“Last year we were getting customers
to go live, but this year the focus
is on getting it to scale,” agrees
Microsoft's EMEA content marketing
manager Stephen Petheram. This factor
alone, Petheram argues, was causing
some operators to consider changing
their middleware, despite the
investment involved.
Of course, middleware alone cannot
deliver scalability, which also requires
sufficient network bandwidth and capacity
within video servers. The role of the
middleware lies in coping with two
particular aspects of service growth:
increasing numbers of consumers
accessing popular content simultaneously;
and expansion in the overall amount
of content consumed - ie the long tail.
Middleware needs to accommodate
a variety of load balancing measures,
such as caching of popular on-demand
content closer to the points of
consumption, even perhaps co-located
with the DSLAMs, to reduce strain
on the core network. While major events
will still be broadcast and consumed live,
there will be a growing amount of
popular near-live content viewed in replay
mode at staggered times, which could
overload the core network.
Middleware also has to scale at the
back-end, where the service integrates
with billing, access control mechanisms,
and a variety of management functions.
None of these on their own should
trip up a middleware vendor, but the
cumulative effect can be lethal, as Scott
Mirer, director of product management
at middleware vendor Kasenna, points
out. “There's a long list of items, such
as billing system integration, matching
encoder output to the STB decoder,
and managing VOD content workflow,
not one of which is a showstopper
on its own, but all of which combine
to make real-life deployments tricky
and time-consuming,” says Mirer.
Flexibility is essentialApart from high numbers
of users and traffic
volumes, scalability also
equates to
“extensability”, or coping with a growing
number of devices, interfaces, and
formats. “It has to coexist within a certain
patchwork of solutions, because some
IPTV deployments are far from being end-
to-end,” says Orca's Ariely. “The CA
(conditional access) may already be in
place, along with the STBs and video
servers. The need for flexible interfaces is
therefore crucial.”
This flexibility must extend to the video
encoder, given that MPEG-2, MPEG-4,
and VC-1, developed by Microsoft, have
all been deployed in significant numbers.
There is also a growing need to embrace
content from the Internet from sources
such as YouTube, where Adobe's Flash
encoder is used. Microsoft, which
originally ran just with its own version
of VC-1 called Windows
Media 9, accepted by 2005 that
it needed to support other codecs
within its middleware. “Now we are
agnostic to the codec,” says Petheram.
Middleware vendors can readily
embrace the leading codecs, because
no new major developments will likely
be there, but it is impossible to anticipate
all future requirements, such as
emerging business models and
new device types. For this
reason, support for
development of new
components within the
middleware platform is
essential. The ability
to support rapid
development and
add new features
is the biggest
‘My channels’ from Dreampark
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issue for many IPTV
operators, according
to Philip Smith, chief
marketing officer at IPTV
specialist Complete TV. “This
is one of the reasons why
many customers use
HTML-based middleware,” Smith notes.
Smith was referring to the client
software, which is often browser
based, with the software written in HTML
or JavaScript. There are also proprietary
interfaces used for accessing settings
on the STB. Smith's point is that, especially
with HTML, care has to be taken to ensure
that the software will support the required
performance, for example in channel
changing, especially as content and
subscriber numbers scale up.
Yet, despite the move towards HTML,
many of these systems still suffer from
scalability issues and performance
on the client side.
The UI challengePerhaps the biggest challenge of all faced
by middleware vendors concerns the user
interface, which has its origins in the
current crop of Electronic Programme
Guides. The game changes completely
as the content catalogue scales up from
a handful of linear channels to, potentially,
the world's whole repertoire of video,
including a new generation of Internet
based and user generated content.
All the vendors claim to have their
heads down on this problem, but
compelling solutions are elusive.
“You can't use a traditional EPG to find
content in the long tail. The next step
is to make content more discoverable,
even if you don't know what you want
to watch,” says Microsoft's Petheram.
“That's what Microsoft is looking at, way
beyond the current capabilities
of MSN or Google search engines.”
Microsoft's goal is to provide video
by recommendation, proposing titles
that match a user's known preferences
or interests. Meanwhile, Orca is
showcasing such a capability at this year's
IBC, with a variety of options. “You can
have recommendations set by the
operator, or based on a community, or
Amazon-type suggestions along the lines
of 'people who have watched this also
watch that',” says Ariely.
Nordic middleware vendor Dreampark
is focused on event-based EPG tools,
believing that IPTV will accelerate the
move towards event-focused, rather than
channel-focused viewing guides.
The company is implementing a search
engine facilitating searches in VOD
archives and EPG. The search function
will give the ability not only to search for
specific titles, but also actors, keywords
etc. Support for tagging will also give end
users the ability to define long tail
segments that could not even be
foreseen when creating the metadata.
“Such tagging may be imported from
Internet sources or be created by the
IPTV community,” says CEO Per Skyttval.
There is an underlying problem,
however, in that video by its nature is
very hard to define - and therefore search
for - on the basis of its content. It relies
on the metadata used to describe and
label it, and this inevitably imposes a
constraint on intelligent search,
particularly for user generated content.
The challenge has to be met though, and
it is too early to say how well the various
middleware packages will perform.
Incorporating Internet-based contentThis leads on to the question of service
expectation among consumers, as
Internet-based content is increasingly
brought into the walled garden of IPTV
services. “The key is to provide the best
Quality of Experience (QoE),” says Brian
Mahony, marketing VP at IPTV
middleware and application vendor Espial
TV. The QoE is not just about traditional
channel changing speed, but should
embrace all possible content, Mahony
contends.
Not all of this content will be available
at the flick of a button, with perhaps
just the major channels immediately
selectable, and then the long tail available
at varying delays depending on the
'searchability' of the content concerned.
Business models need to be considered
here, and particularly the fact that service
providers do not want their customers
to languish within the channels they have
paid for on subscription. They want them
to buy content on demand or services
that they have to pay extra for, and so
these need to be made as easily available
as possible.
Another consideration sometimes
forgotten is that Internet-based content
is not governed by the same regulations
as broadcast content, which comes
under Ofcom's remit in the UK. Operators
will therefore seek business models that
ensure content coming from the Internet
adheres to Ofcom regulations, pertaining,
for example, to 'watersheds', which
are totally irrelevant on the Web.
Middleware can help by providing tools
that help define the rules for Internet
content as it comes in, possibly via a
single Web portal connecting with the
broadcast domain.
Perhaps then middleware will truly
repay the operators that have invested
patience in it as the long tail expands,
and as the broadcast world converges
progressively with the Internet. CSI
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“You can't use a traditional EPG tofind content in the long tail. The nextstep is to make content morediscoverable, even if you don't knowwhat you want to watch.”
“Middleware canhelp by providingtools that helpdefine the rulesfor Internetcontent as itcomes in, possiblyvia a single Webportal.”
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