IPTV operators have not,

until recently, been well

served by their

middleware. This was not

always the fault of middleware

vendors, reflecting more the

fragmented nature of IPTV, and

uncertainty over how it will evolve.

“IPTV has many variants, and services

are provided by a wide variety of different

players, including ISPs, incumbent telcos,

some content providers, and even a few

retailers,” says Sefy Ariely, marketing VP at

Orca, the IPTV middleware market's first

major entrant in 1998. Ariely is, needless

to say, apologising for other vendors'

middleware rather than his own, but his

point is that the field has been challenging

because of its rate of change and lack of

clear definition. By contrast, the cable TV

and satellite fields have been relatively

stable with more clearly defined

infrastructures and business models.

Middleware vendors in these fields

have come into IPTV and had to adapt

as they go along, often at the expense

of operators during trials of their

products, according to Venkat Krishnan,

director of IPTV solutions at Sea Change,

a leading vendor of video servers

and also middleware spanning all forms

of pay TV. “Our CEO, Bill Styslinger,

accurately points out that most of our

competitors have little experience

in video, and are essentially learning

as they go at the expense of the

operator,” says Krishnan. “He calls

these exercises 'gold plated

trials' that have little chance

of making money.”

The field certainly is hot at the

moment, attracting new entrants

at a breathtaking rate given the risk

and effort involved, with around 30

recognised players. A shakeout at some

stage is inevitable as trials migrate into

full-scale deployments, but this point

in the trajectory of IPTV has not yet

been reached. Operators, therefore,

need to be wary, given that their

ability to deliver compelling services

will depend on the flexibility of their

middleware, and the vitality of the

vendors themselves.

It is significant that some of the larger

telcos originally developed their

own middleware because they lacked

confidence either in existing products

to scale, or because the vendors were

deemed too small to trust with such

an important piece of the delivery

infrastructure. Yet in most cases the

telcos have either disposed of their

own middleware, or in effect outsourced

it. BT developed middleware, but gave

up on it, electing to ride with Microsoft's

IPTV Edition, now rechristened

Mediaroom, as its BT Vision IPTV project

took shape. Telefonica in Spain had also

developed its own middleware called

Imagenio, but took a different line, selling

the software to Lucent, now Alcatel-

Lucent, in April 2006, after deciding it

was beyond its resources to maintain it

and keep pace with the fast evolving

requirements. But at least Telefonica kept

faith with its middleware. For this reason,

Alcatel-Lucent welcomed Imagenio with

open arms, gaining a large captive

audience for the middleware among

Telefonica customers, as well as the

potential for marketing it to other service

providers.

In one respect, consensus has now

been reached among both service

providers and operators, over the

requirements of middleware. Perhaps

the first point is that the name

middleware itself has become

inappropriate, although with little idea

what to call it instead. Vendors have

come up with their own cosy names,

such as Kasenna's Living Room, and

Microsoft's Mediaroom.

The term middleware was coined in the

IT data centre world, where middleware

really was the software layer between the

client and back-end services, enabling

Web-based applications to tap into legacy

page fourteen

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Advances in IPTV middleware are helping to improve the userinterface, but providing intelligentsearch remains a challenge, says Philip Hunter

Payback time for IPTV

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databases for example. But in the case

of pay TV in general, and IPTV in

particular, middleware is also responsible

for the client side, both to locate services

and also control access. It will have

to handle DRM as TV services

increasingly penetrate beyond the set

top box to access multiple devices

in home networks.

Coping with scaleYet the first requirement is clearly

scalability, both in terms of consumer

numbers and also volume of content.

“Last year we were getting customers

to go live, but this year the focus

is on getting it to scale,” agrees

Microsoft's EMEA content marketing

manager Stephen Petheram. This factor

alone, Petheram argues, was causing

some operators to consider changing

their middleware, despite the

investment involved.

Of course, middleware alone cannot

deliver scalability, which also requires

sufficient network bandwidth and capacity

within video servers. The role of the

middleware lies in coping with two

particular aspects of service growth:

increasing numbers of consumers

accessing popular content simultaneously;

and expansion in the overall amount

of content consumed - ie the long tail.

Middleware needs to accommodate

a variety of load balancing measures,

such as caching of popular on-demand

content closer to the points of

consumption, even perhaps co-located

with the DSLAMs, to reduce strain

on the core network. While major events

will still be broadcast and consumed live,

there will be a growing amount of

popular near-live content viewed in replay

mode at staggered times, which could

overload the core network.

Middleware also has to scale at the

back-end, where the service integrates

with billing, access control mechanisms,

and a variety of management functions.

None of these on their own should

trip up a middleware vendor, but the

cumulative effect can be lethal, as Scott

Mirer, director of product management

at middleware vendor Kasenna, points

out. “There's a long list of items, such

as billing system integration, matching

encoder output to the STB decoder,

and managing VOD content workflow,

not one of which is a showstopper

on its own, but all of which combine

to make real-life deployments tricky

and time-consuming,” says Mirer.

Flexibility is essentialApart from high numbers

of users and traffic

volumes, scalability also

equates to

“extensability”, or coping with a growing

number of devices, interfaces, and

formats. “It has to coexist within a certain

patchwork of solutions, because some

IPTV deployments are far from being end-

to-end,” says Orca's Ariely. “The CA

(conditional access) may already be in

place, along with the STBs and video

servers. The need for flexible interfaces is

therefore crucial.”

This flexibility must extend to the video

encoder, given that MPEG-2, MPEG-4,

and VC-1, developed by Microsoft, have

all been deployed in significant numbers.

There is also a growing need to embrace

content from the Internet from sources

such as YouTube, where Adobe's Flash

encoder is used. Microsoft, which

originally ran just with its own version

of VC-1 called Windows

Media 9, accepted by 2005 that

it needed to support other codecs

within its middleware. “Now we are

agnostic to the codec,” says Petheram.

Middleware vendors can readily

embrace the leading codecs, because

no new major developments will likely

be there, but it is impossible to anticipate

all future requirements, such as

emerging business models and

new device types. For this

reason, support for

development of new

components within the

middleware platform is

essential. The ability

to support rapid

development and

add new features

is the biggest

‘My channels’ from Dreampark

Leading IPTV solutions

issue for many IPTV

operators, according

to Philip Smith, chief

marketing officer at IPTV

specialist Complete TV. “This

is one of the reasons why

many customers use

HTML-based middleware,” Smith notes.

Smith was referring to the client

software, which is often browser

based, with the software written in HTML

or JavaScript. There are also proprietary

interfaces used for accessing settings

on the STB. Smith's point is that, especially

with HTML, care has to be taken to ensure

that the software will support the required

performance, for example in channel

changing, especially as content and

subscriber numbers scale up.

Yet, despite the move towards HTML,

many of these systems still suffer from

scalability issues and performance

on the client side.

The UI challengePerhaps the biggest challenge of all faced

by middleware vendors concerns the user

interface, which has its origins in the

current crop of Electronic Programme

Guides. The game changes completely

as the content catalogue scales up from

a handful of linear channels to, potentially,

the world's whole repertoire of video,

including a new generation of Internet

based and user generated content.

All the vendors claim to have their

heads down on this problem, but

compelling solutions are elusive.

“You can't use a traditional EPG to find

content in the long tail. The next step

is to make content more discoverable,

even if you don't know what you want

to watch,” says Microsoft's Petheram.

“That's what Microsoft is looking at, way

beyond the current capabilities

of MSN or Google search engines.”

Microsoft's goal is to provide video

by recommendation, proposing titles

that match a user's known preferences

or interests. Meanwhile, Orca is

showcasing such a capability at this year's

IBC, with a variety of options. “You can

have recommendations set by the

operator, or based on a community, or

Amazon-type suggestions along the lines

of 'people who have watched this also

watch that',” says Ariely.

Nordic middleware vendor Dreampark

is focused on event-based EPG tools,

believing that IPTV will accelerate the

move towards event-focused, rather than

channel-focused viewing guides.

The company is implementing a search

engine facilitating searches in VOD

archives and EPG. The search function

will give the ability not only to search for

specific titles, but also actors, keywords

etc. Support for tagging will also give end

users the ability to define long tail

segments that could not even be

foreseen when creating the metadata.

“Such tagging may be imported from

Internet sources or be created by the

IPTV community,” says CEO Per Skyttval.

There is an underlying problem,

however, in that video by its nature is

very hard to define - and therefore search

for - on the basis of its content. It relies

on the metadata used to describe and

label it, and this inevitably imposes a

constraint on intelligent search,

particularly for user generated content.

The challenge has to be met though, and

it is too early to say how well the various

middleware packages will perform.

Incorporating Internet-based contentThis leads on to the question of service

expectation among consumers, as

Internet-based content is increasingly

brought into the walled garden of IPTV

services. “The key is to provide the best

Quality of Experience (QoE),” says Brian

Mahony, marketing VP at IPTV

middleware and application vendor Espial

TV. The QoE is not just about traditional

channel changing speed, but should

embrace all possible content, Mahony

contends.

Not all of this content will be available

at the flick of a button, with perhaps

just the major channels immediately

selectable, and then the long tail available

at varying delays depending on the

'searchability' of the content concerned.

Business models need to be considered

here, and particularly the fact that service

providers do not want their customers

to languish within the channels they have

paid for on subscription. They want them

to buy content on demand or services

that they have to pay extra for, and so

these need to be made as easily available

as possible.

Another consideration sometimes

forgotten is that Internet-based content

is not governed by the same regulations

as broadcast content, which comes

under Ofcom's remit in the UK. Operators

will therefore seek business models that

ensure content coming from the Internet

adheres to Ofcom regulations, pertaining,

for example, to 'watersheds', which

are totally irrelevant on the Web.

Middleware can help by providing tools

that help define the rules for Internet

content as it comes in, possibly via a

single Web portal connecting with the

broadcast domain.

Perhaps then middleware will truly

repay the operators that have invested

patience in it as the long tail expands,

and as the broadcast world converges

progressively with the Internet. CSI

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Middleware

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“You can't use a traditional EPG tofind content in the long tail. The nextstep is to make content morediscoverable, even if you don't knowwhat you want to watch.”

“Middleware canhelp by providingtools that helpdefine the rulesfor Internetcontent as itcomes in, possiblyvia a single Webportal.”

Leading IPTV solutions