Minerva Networks IPTV Blog

The challenge facing IPTV is how to skillfully combine the advantages of a lean-forward experience with the ease of the lean-back experience.  I see a couple of solutions in the offing, but none has caught on just yet.

First, one can allow the user to manage their profile directly through a PC/web interface to the server.  This management interface would allow for extensive customization of the user experience, and it would take advantage of the rich input device environment of the PC – the keyboard and the mouse, and the high resolution of the PC display.  In effect, this high-bandwidth interface allows for fast and sophisticated control of the user preferences.  Think of my Yahoo! for TV.

The other solution is to make richer input and output devices available for the TV.  The joystick has been a very successful input device for the video game market, but it has never caught on with the pay TV environment.  The trackball has not been successful in either market.  Now, the remote for the Wii has been an exciting development for the games market – with wireless motion sensing, pointing, and tactile feedback.  The Blackberry has popularized the tiny handheld keyboard.  SMS messaging has trained millions of people how to type using triple-tap.  Also, with HD TV, the resolution of the display allows for much more information to be displayed to the user.  Which of these translate to the lean-back experience?  We’ll see.

The TV Service Provider has a natural advantage over other services trying to place their devices in the home – just about everyone wants TV service.  The set-top box becomes the Trojan Horse for other services, all naturally delivered over IP networks.  Now it’s up to companies like Minerva to make sure that the soldiers in the horse are ready for action.

- Andy Crowe, VP Worldwide Field Operations

When the main doors closed at 4.00 PM on the last day of the show, the IBC organization proudly announced an attendance figure of 49,250: quite good despite the current worldwide economic problems. Unfortunately most of the show tickets were given for free, so this cannot really be an index of how the market or even the show went: quality more than quantity was what we were looking for. And I believe that the quality of the visitors was there indeed: IPTV is no longer an unknown word and technology, but attracts a selected number of well trained and conscious people.

Our booth caught the attention of a good part of this “crowd” (from European Internet Service Providers, to local and global System Integrators and partners) that were impressed by our new Smoke UI look&feel with fancy animations and were interested in the interactive applications (such as Widgets for RSS news, Weather, Stocks etc..) that we’ve developed using SDM, our XML APIs, that gave them good ideas on how to create new revenue opportunities and add so called Value Added Services (VAS) using our solution.

We are very proud of what we achieved with our European customer Multimedia Polska, that  was nominee at the IBC Awards and placed themselves as follows:

HIGHLY COMMENDED: Multimedia Polska: First Commercially Available Cable/IPTV VOD Service Launched in Poland
End User: Multimedia Polska S.A
Technology/Equipment Supplier: Harmonic Inc., Osmosys, ADB, Latens, Tandberg TV, Minerva Networks
Poland

(Take a look at the Multimedia Polska case study.)

For sure IPTV is gaining traction in the market, which is now mature (this is the quality that I mentioned at the beginning of my post) and ready to welcome Worldwide this exciting technology, revolutionizing the TV experience of millions of subscribers.

-Marco Bonomi, Business Development Manager, EMEA

Clarksville Electrical Department in Tennessee needed to update their TV services to include HD programming and PVR support. Their current middleware solution could not support these features, so Clarksville came to Minerva for help. They wanted to migrate their middleware solution as smoothly as possible. Disruption of services was a valid concern for CDE. Any time offline can create a headache for operators because it entails a disruption in business, not to mention inconvenience to customers, who in response, may switch to a different video provider such as cable or satellite.

Given the short timeline to complete the project, Minerva was still able to migrate CDE in record time. We came in on Tuesday to begin migrating Clarksville’s previous system to Minerva’s. We set up the new Dell servers and RACs and uploaded the latest software and configured it to CDE’s network. We also tested STB functionality on temporary “new” customers put into the system to ensure that the SW upgrade on the STB went well and features like PVR, PPV and 3rd-party platforms were working properly. On Thursday evening at midnight, the service provider had scheduled the network upgrade. The entire process took a total of less than 30 mins! On Friday morning, when subscribers worked , they were greeted with a new, faster, easier-to-use client UI and HD programs and PVR capabilities.

A few reasons why the migration at Clarksville was a huge success:

Streamlined migration planning and management

Just within the past year, 10 telco operators have migrated from a competitor solution to Minerva’s iTVManager platform. With this level and frequency of conversions, Minerva has gained the expertise to plan and manage these projects — from HW installation to SW upgrades to porting the customer databases. We’re able to manage the project with efficiency and therefore, minimizing costs for our customers.

Excellent relationships with our technology partners

Minerva has an expansive ecosystem of IPTV technology partners. Every vendor (Minerva, Verimatrix, Motorola and ETI) was onsite and clearly knew all the conditions on the ground before jumping into the mix. This minimized any technical surprises during the implementation process.

Familiarity of product integration

One of the biggest challenges when migrating from a competitive solution to another is not only being able to transfer the service provider’s entire database from one system to another, but also having that information easily ported into the middleware’s modules, such as settings, channel lineups, etc. ETI and Minerva have worked together on numerous projects, and thus, ETI was very familiar with how to integrate their application into Minerva’s platform via our APIs.

- Minerva Field Support Engineer

Who is really buying your IPTV service and who is not, and why?

When Minerva thinks about increasing penetration the first questions that come to mind are who is buying IPTV and who is not buying IPTV, and why.

If it has not been done already, each IPTV operators needs to implement some level of research to answer these critical questions.

Minerva strongly believes in using demographic and behavioral segmentation, and then packaging and marketing solutions based on the results. By selecting from a list of the top 3-5 target groups, and implementing changes based on their needs, it is very possible to have a significant impact on IPTV penetration.

Minerva is working with a company called Claritas to help our customers conduct the necessary research and analysis. Claritas is a leader in this area, and counts 9 of the top 10 North American telcos as customers.

Claritas has divided the telecom market into 53 segments; each sharing common demographics and technology adoption traits for voice, video, and data services. The segments can be rolled up into 10 larger lifestage groups. (You can find a chart showing these segments in our latest webinar posted on the following web page http://www.minervanetworks.com/company/press-room.)

One example is F3 Early-Adopting Elite. These are households with the greatest likelihood of acquiring new technology. They are families with children and have the second highest average household income ($108,000) in the US.

Early-Adopting Elite families have huge appetites for the latest consumer electronics, such as portable media players, smart phones, and wireless devices w/ Internet access. They work in white collar jobs and outfit home offices with a wireless network, scanners, video game consoles, etc. Early-Adopting Elite have the highest Internet usage, going online to track investments, bank accounts, get news, and research purchases.

Regarding IPTV, Early-Adopting Elite households have the highest propensity to take this service. They are 80% more likely than the average household to subscribe to IPTV. How many households from this segment are in your territory, and who are they? What do they want from IPTV?

Claritas has household data on about 120 million homes from which to do an analysis of your customer data. They usually can group 80-85% of your customer base into a specific segment.

The goal of analyzing your data would be to identify which segments are buying IPTV and which segments are not. As well to determine how many households in each segment have not bought IPTV.

How it works, Claritas takes your existing customer data and runs it through their software called Connexion. The report shows all the segments which are buying and not buying IPTV, as well as details on voice and data service.

You can then list the top target segments and conduct in person focus groups, or over the phone surveys to determine the key issues, needs, desires, etc. for each group.

Based on that information Minerva can then help you create new packages, services, and bundles that would appeal to the target groups.

The last step is to develop marketing materials, then reach out to the target segments.

Reed Majors – Minerva Marketing Team

According to recent reports, it’s estimated that there will be over 50 million IPTV subscribers by 2012. The 2008 Beijing Olympics sparked a high level of interest and new subscriptions for China’s IPTV service providers. China Telecom has a total IPTV subscriber base of nearly 1 million. Reportedly, 3000 new IPTV service orders from China Telecom were received each day prior to the Opening Ceremonies.

As demand for IPTV (including advanced services like HD and PVR) grows, so does the stress on the last mile bandwidth to the home. Service providers need practical and effective ways to manage their networks. Minerva’s iTVManager Bandwidth Management feature allows operators to limit the maximum bandwidth that can be consumed by the subscriber. Through its BackOffice console, operators can enable or disable HD and PVR on each STB, and can also set the maximum number of simultaneous streams a PVR box can record.

For example: A home can only support 12Mbps but the subscriber wants 3 STBs and HD service. For this user, one PVR STB would be configured to support HD with 1 stream recording. The other two non-PVR STBs would have HD disabled. With this configuration, the maximum bandwidth to the home would be 1 HD + 2 SD streams (assumes H.264). Assume a year later the network is upgraded and that particular home can support 20Mbps. With just a simple BackOffice parameter change, the HD/PVR STB can be configured to record up to 2 HD streams. No truck rolls. No STB reflashing. No service outages.

By having control over those features that consume bandwidth, operators can easily match service levels to bandwidth limitations, lowering infrastructure costs and improving customer satisfaction. This will prove to be an invaluable feature to IPTV service providers worldwide.

- Minerva Marketing Manager

Minerva Networks’ Stateless Display Module (SDM) is a set of XML APIs that are parsed and rendered onto a television display by a set top box. SDM templates display on top of the television feed and give the viewer an interactive component that enhances the television viewing experience. Minerva provides a robust set of APIs that handle everything from look/feel to user interaction via text entry and selection fields to automated messaging to a back-end application server.

I have developed several applications using SDM. After quickly familiarizing myself with the available APIs and their functionality, I’ve found that writing the SDM XML component is the least time-consuming part of the application development process. Typically, the first thing that I do is write a rough SDM display template so I can see what type of information I’ll need to assemble and what, if any, navigation and/or trigger objects will be used. After nailing down the look & feel of the display template, making sure that the in-application navigation and scene display works as expected, and verifying that the data and parameter transfer correctly flows between the TV and the application server hosting the SDM-application, the rest of my time is spent writing the back-end server code.

Interactive weather guide developed with Minerva's SDM platform

The back-end server handles all of the application logic, assembles the response (in SDM XML format) and returns it to the set top box when the application is invoked by the viewer. This is one of the key benefits of SDM…since it is dynamically assembled by an application server developers can build very interactive, powerful, and visually stimulating applications where the majority of the processing takes place off of the set-top box so the viewer’s television experience isn’t impacted by performance slow downs.

Development of SDM is on-going and as we come across new features that Minerva or our partners envision new APIs are written and the functionality is activated. Moving forward we’re working to tightly integrate SDM with Minerva’s client set-top box software so that more functionality available within the client can be directly referenced by SDM application developers.

- Minerva Web Application Engineer

The evolution of IPTV has been slow…….all early predictions seemed to have been a little too optimistic. It was fun trying! I remember in 1995 working on the SBC Richardson, Texas trial that everyone thought would change the face of telecom services.  SBC built this amazing headend facility and infrastructure in Richardson, we (meaning everyone at NUKO, the encoder vendor for the project) thought it was just the beginning of a giant industry shift.  Fast forward to 1999, Next Level is rolling out service with Qwest and few others, ImagicTV is entering the market, Oracle is touting its video server, and a small company called SourceNet (later to become Myrio) is building an IPTV solution in Reno with three people.  Many things happened from that point forward (it would make for interesting book on the history and people that worked in the IPTV industry)……two things stayed the same IPTV products were hard to build, particularly the set-top boxes, and growth was slower than most people anticipated.  Everyone continued their hard work right through the Telecom drought, always believing that consumers wanted something better and that IPTV was the holy grail.  I remember stomping through the Swedish snow in January installing a Minerva, SourceNet, StellarOne, SGI system at Telia in 2000 (my dates are a little fuzzy, so excuse any inaccuracies) and thinking we are almost there (I brought the wrong shoes might have been a good metaphor for the result).  It was probably a bit too early in the evolution of IPTV to be building a system of that size and scope, but it was a great learning experience for everyone involved.

Fast forward again to the present (July 2008), 13 years after the first SBC trial and we see ATT battling with Verizon to claim leadership in IPTV (maybe “TelcoTV” when you include Verizon), and pushing for 1 million subs before year end.  Along with ATT another 500 or so phones companies across the world are working just as hard to capture new IPTV customers.  Those three guys at SourceNet have moved on, two of them made it to Siemens when they bought Myrio, and have moved on from there to greater things.  Unfortunately, and a big loss for us all, the third person Tony Atwater passed away last year.  Tony had a wonderful way about him, and is a big reason why Minerva is in the IPTV business today. That would be a good story for a future posting.

After a two year absence I am back in IPTV doing marketing for Minerva, and enjoying it very much, IPTV is a great industry to work in, I feel lucky to be involved!

Now a new set of questions have emerged, the biggest of all being (I am quoting someone else here) “how do we put the IP in IPTV,” meaning what is that magic mix of services that will make IPTV the holy grail we all have been searching for.  Over the coming months and years I hope the various posting and comments in this blog will bring some perspective to that question, and the other questions that arise, as well as give some insight to the reader the progress Minerva and others are making towards creating a better consumer experience.

Reed Majors - www.minervanetworks.com