ORCA and BCC to Wholesale IPTV in in Russia

Orca Interactive has partnered with BCC, a system integrator to deliver a wholesale IPTV service across Russia. North-West Telecom, Sibir Telecom, and Southern Telecommunications are incumbent carriers that will market this service to smaller local companies.

I spoke to Orca about this announcement. Orca said that BCC will deliver broadcast content over fiber to the local carriers that sign up to this service. Orca said that broadband penetration is growing across Russia but is still at a relatively low level. This wholesale approach will lower the cost of introducing an IPTV service by providing a shared headend service. This will improve the business case for IPTV in Russia, where the rate of growth is likely to be low compared to Western Europe and North America.

Orca is smart to emphasize less developed markets such as Russia. Less developed countries such as Russia, the Middle East, and Latin America are likely to present the best new IPTV opportunities.

I Goofed: SonaeCom Ericsson/Orca Correction

I requested clarification of what SonaeCom is doing with its IPTV middleware and received the following reply:

"Following the RFI process that we had in late April (where Orca also participated) two vendors requested us an onsite trial with no commitment from SonaeCom.

Our RFI process had the goal to evaluate the industry trends and roadmaps from the principal players in the market. We often conduct this RFI processes to understand the competitive advantage or disadvantage of the solutions that we are using independently of future intentions.

One of the vendors that requested us an on site trial was Ericsson."

Ericsson's press release is consistent with SonaeCom's statement above. I read too much into it. I apologize to all concerned for this error. I hope that it has not caused too much difficulty.

Alcatel-Lucent TPSDA 2.0 Steals Microsoft's Thunder

Alcatel-Lucent has introduced IPTV application awareness into its Triple Play Services Delivery Architecture (TPSDA) 2.0. It will add flash storage to its edge routers, its switches, and its access nodes that will support fast channel change, packet retransmission, and targeted ad insertion.

• For fast channel change the last few minutes of every multicast channel will be stored in the network and the new channel will be started immediately, eliminating the latency that typically occurs today. Alcatel-Lucent said that HD channel change time will be reduced from several seconds to well under a second.
• For packet retransmission the network will store enough packets to immediately service the packet retransmission request.
• For ad insertion targeted ads will be stored and inserted in the network.

If the service provider uses Alcatel-Lucent access nodes, these functions can be provided in the access network. These functions can also be provided in the Alcatel-Lucent switches or edge routers for service providers using Alcatel-Lucent's TPSDA 2.0 architecture.

Alcatel-Lucent has also discussed plans to increase the amount of storage in these network elements in order to support rewind TV and video on demand delivery.

TPSDA 2.0 can support these functions for service providers using access nodes from other manufacturers by implementing them in the switches and edge routers.

Microsoft has not announced any support for these network capabilities.

This is an interesting announcement. It enables middleware companies other than Microsoft to support fast channel change. This includes both the Alcatel-Lucent MiView and OMP middleware as well as other middleware from companies such as Thomson and Orca. This approach to fast channel change will eliminate one of Microsoft's most competitive features.

This approach will give service providers new flexibility in managing the bandwidth demands from an IPTV service, especially as more and more on demand and personalized services are provided. I think the flexibility that it gives in placing storage in the network will improve the ability of service providers to optimize their networks.

Ericsson Gets Sonaecom Middleware Order

Sonaecom, the competitive provider in Portugal, has selected Ericsson's new IMS-based middleware software for its IPTV service. Sonaecom will also use video encoder from Ericsson's Tandberg subsidiary. Trials and deployments have already started.

Ericsson has been using Orca's middleware at Sonaecom. In this case Ericsson is replacing a smaller middleware vendor at a smaller deployment. Ericsson's challenge will be to do the same thing with a Tier 1 carrier.

Orca and Ruwido Create Fingerprint Personalization

Orca Interactive and Ruwido have created the ability to use fingerprints to personalize the IPTV viewing experience. Orca is the Israeli middleware company that is now a subsidiary of Viaccess. Ruwido is an Austrian manufacturer of remote control devices that has been used by several European IPTV providers.

The Orca middleware will be able to distinguish user by reading their fingerprint using a Ruwido remote control. Orca stated that this will be used to personalize viewing including defining favorite channels, video on demand content, and PVR content. It can also change skins and set parental controls. It can also facilitate targeting advertising to each specific viewer.

This is an interesting approach that is simpler and more direct than requiring some kind of sign in process. It will be interesting to see how this works in a real deployment.

Viaccess Acquires Orca Interactive

Viaccess, the French content security company, acquire Israeli middleware provider Orca Interactive for $21.4 million. Ordca stated that its middleware supports 1.2 million active subscribers globally.

Viacess acquired Orca for a low price and now has the ability to provide middleware as well as content security. This acquisition should help Viaccess in tier 2 and tier 3 markets in particular. It will not be much help in competing with Microsoft for Tier 1s

Orca Introduces Content Search

Orca Interactive has introduced a content recommendation engine called COMPASS as part of its IPTV middleware software system. COMPASS will be in beta test at a small number of IPTV service providers in 1H08 and will be released for general availability before the start of 2H08.

There are three components to COMPASS:

• The user interface
• The recommendation engine
• The backend management console

Orca's goal is to make the user interface simple so that the recommendation service will be easy for viewers to use and, consequently, useful. The tool will cover broadcast content, video on demand content, content recorded on the local DVR or the network PVR service, and user generated and other kinds of long tail content.

The recommendation engine is the software that generates recommendations. Its recommendations will be based on popularity, recommendations, and user preferences as defined by past selections. The recommendation engine that Orca provides is based on research work funded in part by the Israeli government.

The backend management console permits the IPTV service provider to define how the selection process works. For example, the IPTV service provider can define:

• The relative importance of each type of recommendation type in the results. For example, the weighting of popularity, ratings, and user preference can be adjusted to favor one over the other to optimize the results for the service providers specific subscriber population.
• The IPTV service provider can include recommendations from premium packages that the viewer does not subscribe to to encourage up selling and increasing ARPUs.

Orca has found out that it is important to give individual viewers to filter out content that they do not want rather than to positively select content. For example, families without children, will filter out children's programming.

I think that Orca is onto an important feature here. Identifying content and having interesting content presented to you without having to search for it will be a key to IPTV and other long tail services. It will be interesting to see how well Orca's efforts pan out.