IPTV World — Often promised but never quite fulfilled, full “three-screen” capability – the ability to view TV and video-on-demand on PCs, mobile devices, and conventional television sets – has for the last few years been something of a chimera for operators and for consumers. At the IPTV World Forum in London, it moved closer to reality as Nokia Siemens Networks and other technology providers debuted software platforms for delivering TV on multiple devices.
Noting that delivering three-screen content is “complex and operationally costly for the operator,” NSN has devised a platform that it said supports multiple IPTV environments via a single management system that’s based on established specifications including DVB-IPTV and the “Baseline Managed Profile” from the Open IPTV Forum. DVB-IPTV stands for Digital Video Broadcasting-Internet Protocol TV.
Also touting three-screen approaches at the IPTV show in London were Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), with its Multi-Screen Video Solution, Chinese vendor ZTE Corp., and Ericsson (ERIC), which offers its unfortunately named “End-to-Endless TV” platform.
Nokia Siemens advertises its new three-screen system as an "open platform," based on Java, that will enable new apps from third-party developers. “By providing an open environment for app development,” said Brook Longdon, head of media and entertainment solutions at NSN, “we free operators to partner with developers without being bound to any one vendor's roadmaps and to differentiate their service.”
That’s a bit of a misnomer, since NSN, naturally, is hoping to convince operators to “differentiate their service” by following its own roadmap. On that score, the vendor engaged in a bit of euphemism when it talked about personal video recording that includes both “user-controlled and operator-controlled recording functionality, to allow flexibility in business models and in navigating content rights issues.”
Translation: Our platform will allow providers to control which programs viewers can access, when. Not exactly full and rich three-screen freedom, that. But it’s a start.
