Just how far the IPTV market has progressed from searching for the application that would differentiate telco offerings from cable TV came into full view last week in Madrid at Broadband World Forum Europe, as vendors worldwide touted their ability to offer true on-demand video services. At the same time, many vendors spent the week announcing agreements with each other and proving their ability to play nice together.

Among the various booths at the show, sponsored by Telefonica, was an IPTV Pavilion designed to showcase interoperability among various vendors. Put together by mPhase and sponsored by the International Engineering Consortium, the pavilion included mPhase's software, Espial's middleware and Latens' and Ranch Networks' security systems running off Sky-Stream headend equipment.

“We have two messages we're trying to get across,” said Philip Thompson, executive vice president of product management for mPhase. “One is interoperability. The other major demo has what we see as some of the possibilities with IPTV.”

Many vendors, in fact, used the show for their first public demonstrations of interoperability. Latens, for instance, announced that it has integrated its content and revenue protection system with Agama Technologies' IPTV monitoring solution. Likewise, Motive announced a strategic alliance with Thomson that will merge the former's management software with the latter's hardware, including IP set-top boxes.

Such alliances are becoming more common as vendors realize that even the largest among them would have trouble providing all the parts of an end-to-end IPTV system. Early service provider entrants in the IPTV market are demanding interoperability among many vendors immediately, concerning themselves more with the basics of setting up networks than differentiating services, said Andy Mathieson, director of Latens.

“What you're seeing with IPTV, especially in Europe, is there are people stepping into pay TV that haven't been there before,” he said. “Most of the early RFPs were very technical about networks and focused on questions that are very security-oriented. There wasn't a lot about functionality or the logistics and processes of running the systems. In a way, a lot of this is like the early days of digital TV. The integration requirements are difficult because there are no standards.”

That's leading to a market in which vendors are trying to align themselves with as many other vendors as possible. However, there's also a risk for vendors because the cost of proving interoperability can escalate quickly if too many elements become involved.

Ultimately, it's the goal of virtually all the alliances to develop interesting applications. And if the show last week is an indication, expect to see a lot of services that personalize the TV experience for individual viewers. Several access vendors, along with those in the media server and related software space, are talking of the possibility of network-based personal video recorders. ECI Telecom, which debuted its IPDSLAM late last month and was in Madrid last week, said it already is seeing a lot of demands for services that let carriers deliver large amounts of on-demand content.

“Today we see a lot of unicast and personalization demands,” said Aviv Ronai, associate vice president of marketing for ECI's broadband access division. “You need a lot of bandwidth coming from the network.”

IPTV Success Factors

• Uses open standards-based, open-interface technology
• Enables efficient provisioning of services, subscribers
• Delivers high-quality user experience,rich content, ease of use, reliability
• Delivers desired services — broadcast TV, on-demand, tiered services and pricing, etc.
• Actively creates new services — allows customization, responds to demand, creates demand

Source: mPhase