CHICAGO--Ericsson signaled its entrance into IPTV today, announcing an end-to-end IP video platform tightly integrated with its market-leading IMS architecture. The Swedish vendor also revealed it has been collaborating with Sony Electronics to connect its digital home TV and multimedia products with its own IMS applications.

Built in partnership with Kasenna, the IPTV platform supports standard and high-definition TV, video-on-demand, network personal video recording and electronic programming interfaces for GPON fiber and VDSL deployments. But Ericsson also boasted of some unique platform features owing to the platform’s tight-knit development with IMS. The platform supports charging and end-user authentication, both key components necessary to extend IPTV services beyond the home to wireless and other public IP networks, Ericsson officials said.

The Sony partnership demonstrated just those capabilities as the two already closely tied vendors unveiled a prototype home network that allowed for multimedia sharing across the home and wireless continuums. At its booth at Globalcomm, Ericsson showed a TV and media server communicating with Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) standard protocols, allowing them to swap media such as movies, photos and live TV programming between devices. The media server was in turn connected to an Ericsson home IMS gateway, embedded with a SIP stack that allows those home electronics to communicate and trade with IMS applications and SIP-enabled handsets on the wide area network.

Ericsson business unit systems director of marketing Mikael Halen said that while Ericsson and Sony collaborate closely on their mobile handset venture, their IP video and IMS work has not reached Sony Ericsson’s point of development. The two have only agreed, Halen said, to develop a “proof-of-concept” solutions to pique interest in IP video over IMS and supply a working real-world IMS demo—which for now are far and in between.

Ericsson today also announced two application hosting contracts with U.S. carriers. Ericsson will supply, integrate and manage Rural Cellular Corp.’s new mobile e-mail service, called Mail2Go. And it will host a content download portal for Centennial Wireless.