ZTE IPTV System

I was at the ZTE analyst meeting in Shenzhen, China on March 25 and 26. ZTE was quite serious about its telco IPTV system. It offers an open system that combines ZTE and third party components, including:

• Headends from Tut Systems (now part of Motorola), Optibase, Tandberg TV, envivio, and Thomson
• Video On Demand Servers from ZTE
• Middleware from ZTE
• Content Security from ZTE, Irdeto and Verimatrix
• Set-top boxes from ZTE, Sunniwell, and Yuxing

ZTE stated that its systems are in more than 20 deployments and trials and are currently supporting one million telco IPTV subscribers, including

• China (with 50 percent market share according to ZTE's numbers)
• Free Internet, Thailand
• VNPT Vietnam
• Belorussian Telecom
• Progroup, Estonia
• STC, Saudi Arabia
• Emcali, Columbia
• CanTV, Venezuela

ZTE's basic business strategy is to focus on developing countries, especially China and India. This is a good strategy, since this is where the new opportunities are coming from.

Envivio has China's AVS Encode

Envivio of South San Francisco California has announced that its IPTV encoders now support China's AVS encoding standard. The company will demonstrate its AVS encoder at CCBN in Beijing at the end of March.

All of the intellectual property for AVS is owned by China. The intellectual property behind the MPEG-4 AVC video encoding standard is owned by western companies. Using AVS eliminates the requirement to make payments to companies outside of China to use MPEG-4 AVC. The AVS standard is broader in that it includes contains video, audio and digital rights management AVS became the national standard in China in April 2005.

Information about AVS may be found at:

http://www.avs.org.cn/en/

It is clear how having a separate standard helps China from a licensing point of view. China is working to own its own intellectual property and to keep a much higher portion of systems revenue in China. There seems to be no strong technical or performance reason for a separate standard.