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Archive for the 'IPTV' Category

IBC Report - Microsoft considers Canvas as possible Mediaroom feature

September 14, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Microsoft is considering supporting the UK Canvas specification - backed by a BBC, ITV and BT joint venture - as a possible feature of its Mediaroom IPTV suite, but only if it is genuinely open.

The suggestion came from Ted Malone, senior director of product management for TV, video, music and platform business at Microsoft, when Connected TV met up with him at IBC.

“If it proceeds as an open approach,” said Malone, “we could add support as a feature of Mediaroom.” Malone said that Microsoft would be paying close attention to the Canvas specification, when it finally emerges, to see if it included any proprietary standards. If so, Microsoft would not consider it to be “an open format.”

Malone declined to comment on what role BT Vision might play within the Canvas venture (a source of considerable speculation at IBC) , but, since this incorporates Mediaroom technology, albeit in a limited implementation, it does suggest one way in which the hybrid concept could be extended to accommodate Canvas. That, of course, will depend on what technology elements the Canvas venture eventually decides to incorporate in its specification, and whether it gets regulatory approval.

Malone pointed out that Microsoft was itself in the process of refashioning Mediaroom to make it a more open platform: for instance, he said, the current Windows Media Player DRM used in its IPTV suite was viewed as having reached the end of its working-life. It would now be replaced by PlayReady, a next-generation DRM product which is already part of the Silverlight platform.

This would make it easier for a Mediaroom set-top box to stream protected video content to other devices in the home. “We’re looking to migrate all of our proprietary DRM [to PlayReady],” Malone said.

The move reflects increasing convergence between the Mediaroom product - intended for managed IPTV platforms - and Microsoft’s ‘over-the-top’ technologies. For instance, Mediaroom will be extended to support Silverlight itself as well as the PlayReady DRM it incorporates. It will also adopt Microsoft’s Smooth Streaming technology. This adapts the quality of the video stream in real time, based upon the consumer’s changing bandwidth and the performance of his or her device, to minimise buffering time and offer faster startup times.

“Mediaroom will embrace these and extend the reach of the Mediaroom service,” said Malone.

Connected TV views this as a natural progression: as the performance and reliability of consumers’ broadband links increases and offers a video experience more akin to that of a managed IPTV network, the need for Microsoft to support two entirely distinct product lines is disappearing.

Posted in Broadband, IPTV and TV-over-Internet. 3 Comments

IBC Report - DVB-T2: a possible home for the DVB’s next-generation handheld standard?

September 13, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Connected TV met up at IBC for the first time with Peter Siebert, who recently took over from Peter MacAvock as executive director of the DVB Project office (earning himself the nickname ‘Peter 2.0′ in the process), and was treated to the latest version of the DVB standards road-map.

One of the most interesting elements to come out of our discussion concerned the fate of what used to be known as DVB-H2 - the next-generation version of the mobile/handheld broadcast standard DVB-H.

Temporarily shelved because of an intervening effort to get the satellite/terrestrial hybrid version of DVB-H (DVB-SH) underway (its first European implementation will be on the Solaris Mobile venture (see previous post), it is now back on the books again - under the working title of DVB-NGH (for ‘Next Generation Handheld).

Asked whether DVB-T2 - which has always encompassed advanced mobile broadcast capabilities as well as high-capacity fixed HDTV ones - mightn’t itself play the role of a DVB-H substitute, Siefert conceded that “maybe [DVB-NGH] is only DVB-T2. The elements of DVB-T2 are a good candidate.”

On the face of it, this might make good sense: operators in some countries are already looking upon robust profiles of DVB-T as a potential substitute for DVB-H, simply because such implementations re-use a pre-existing transmitter network.

Equally likely, perhaps, would be DVB-T2 with ‘add-ons’ - for instance, DVB-NGH could contain DVB-T2 plus LGE (4G) elements - or, indeed, it could end up as something entirely separate from DVB-T2, Siebert said.

In any event, the next DVB Technical Module meeting is expected to give the go-ahead to a new technical group which will decide what NGH will be based on.

At that same meeting, a study group will be reporting back on current industry 3D developments (very much the theme of this year’s IBC show) with a view to a decision being reached about what DVB’s role should be in the 3D standardisation process, if any. Siebert suggested DVB come contribute elements to do with service information and transport protocols.

Siebert said there was also an ongoing discussion going on between the HBBTV backers (see previous story) and DVB as to “whether DVB should play a more active role” in the hybrid DVB standardisation space, perhaps acting as an umbrella group for various industry initiatives.

Amongst other recent developments, nine European operators, including the likes of Kabel Deutschland, Kabel Baden Wittenberg, Ono and Com Hem, have now committed themselves to the next-generation version of DVB’s cable standard, DVB-C2. Siebert commented that in Germany in particular, cable operators were running out of capacity, so they required the extra capacity DVB-C2 could offer. As an example, he pointed to the fact that Kabel Deutchsland’s RFPs now contained questions about whether set-top box manufacturers were able to support DVB-C2.

The first DVB-C2 prototypes are due to be shown at the Anga Cable show in Germany next year, and IBC 2010 would certainly feature the technology, Siebert said.

Posted in Digital Cable, Digital Terrestrial, IPTV, Mobile TV and TV-over-Internet. 0 Comments

IBC Report - Civolution water-marking technology poised for Q1 2010 rollout with major US pay-TV operator

September 12, 2009 by Barry Flynn

The first large-scale deployment of watermarking technology in the pay-TV world should take place in the US in Q1 next year, Connected TV has learned.

Watermarking is a technique which embeds invisible identifiers into broadcast and other content, which can survive multiple transmission, compression and copying stages, in order to identify the sources of pirated material. Each device in the pre-production, production and transmission chain, all the way down to individual set-top boxes, can be given a unique code to pinpoint where the ‘leak’ has taken place.

Speaking at IBC, Alex Terpstra, CEO of Philips watermarking spin-off Civolution, declined to name the US operator in question, but said the Civolution solution it would be supplying is a hybrid one, integrating the technology at the encoder end and the set-top box. This means that as well as identifying piracy taking place at the headend, any set-top box used to illegally re-distribute protected material  can be precisely identified.

“There will be deployments in the field, we hope, in Q1 in North America,” he said. “I believe it is a break-through in the development of this industry.” The water-marking technology will be targeted at  protecting HDTV content.

Previously, except for a few small-scale IPTV deployments where watermarking is integrated into the DRM system , such content identification technologies have been confined to the pre-release market.

Examples include protecting preview copies of films given limited distribution before events such as the Oscars or the Cannes Film Festival, or content aimed at in-hotel distribution (where premium movies are made available before standard pay-per-view and pay-TV release windows).

Terprstra said the fact that the technology was now mature would permit new business models: for example, consumers might be happy to pay a premium to watch a movie at home in VOD mode while (or even before) it was being shown in the cinema. Previously, the studios might have been reluctant to allow this to happen without some sort of guarantee that piracy risks were being addressed.

At IBC, Civolution also announced that Taiwanese company MStar Semiconductor had become the first chipset maker to integrate NexGuard - Civolution’s core watermarking technology - in hardware, as part of its MSD3A11 chipset.

Posted in Digital Cable, Digital Satellite, Digital Terrestrial and IPTV. 0 Comments

Farncombe: Pay-TV shift to two-way networks will mean move away from smartcard-based conditional access systems

May 21, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Farncombe Consulting Group, which hosts this blog, has just published a new White Paper on how the Digital TV Conditional Access sector will be affected by the shift towards broadband-enabled pay-TV networks.

Written by Farncombe’s own highly-experienced group of in-house video security experts, the White Paper assesses the pros and cons of using smartcard-based and cardless systems in different types of pay-TV set-up, ranging from traditional one-way broadcast TV operations to broadband-enabled two-way IP and connected home networks.

The paper concludes that while smartcards continue to remain the solution of choice for protecting one-way systems, cardless-based solutions are preferable for protecting video content in IPTV, ‘over-the-top’ and home networking contexts.

For one-way networks migrating to broadband connectivity, meanwhile, both types of system have their advantages, depending largely on the availability, reliability and quality of the broadband network.

The White Paper’s authors go on to suggest that since the traditional one-way pay-TV world is slowly but surely changing into a two-way one, it is likely that there will be a gradual shift away from smartcard-based systems in favour of cardless ones - led by the digital cable sector.

A PDF of the new White Paper can be obtained from Farncombe by clicking here and filling in a simple registration form.

Posted in Broadband, Digital Cable, Digital Satellite, Digital Terrestrial, IPTV and TV-over-Internet. 0 Comments

VimpelCom’s ‘Beeline TV’ IPTV service launches in Russia with Microsoft Mediaroom

May 12, 2009 by Barry Flynn

Russian telco VimpelCom, which tied up an agreement with Microsoft to deploy Mediaroom just under a year ago (see our previous post), has launched its Beeline TV service - the first implementation of Microsoft’s IPTV technology in the Russian/CIS market.

The move follows a successful commercial trial of the Microsoft platform by VimpelCom under the Corbina TV brand. Corbina Telecom is a subsidiary of VimpelCom.

Intriguingly, Microsoft’s original press release about the deal said the service would launch in ‘mid-2008′ - a statement we repeated at the time. Connected TV now assumes that was a typo! Otherwise, there’s been almost a year’s delay. Microsoft has now told Connected TV that a mid-2008 commercial launch had indeed been envisaged, and accepts there has effectively been a delay of nearly a year. Microsoft puts this down to the fact that it had agreed the trial with Corbina Telecom before its acquisition by VimpelCom.

Whatever the precise reasons for the delay, the deployment is a potentially major one for Microsoft: Beeline currently has in excess of 800,000 broadband subscribers in Russia, but the VimpelCom Group also has companies operating in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, and Armenia.

As of September 30, 2008, VimpelCom’s total number of active subscribers in Russia and the CIS was 57.8 million (including 45.1 million in Russia, 5.6 million in Kazakhstan, 3.1 million in Uzbekistan and 2.4 million in Ukraine).

Beeline TV subs will be able to access typical PVR functionality, some 3,000 on-demand programmes and movies, 125 channels (including 4 HD channels), as well as soccer matches from the Russian Premier League, Russian Championship and indoor Russian Championship.

Subscribers to the Beeline TV service will be offered the base package (100 channels) for 270 Rubles (€6.16) per month and the advanced package (125 Channels) for 495 Rubles (€11.29) per month with on-demand shows from 5-100 Rubles (€0.11-2.28).

Posted in Broadband and IPTV. 0 Comments