It was in February 2007 that Ericsson absorbed Tandberg TV, paying a cool $1.38bn for the assets and knocking Arris – which had already started acquisition proceedings – right out of the frame in the process. The fruits of the acquisition are now showing, says Eric Cooney (pictured, left).

  Visitors to IBC will be the first to examine Ericsson’s brand new end-to-end IPTV solution, which dovetails very nicely into Tandberg’s portfolio of TV products.

Ericsson’s ‘IPTV Business Solution 2.0’ product is part of their and Tandberg’s “consolidated strategy for the convergence of digital television,” in the words of Eric Cooney, president of Tandberg Television, and head of TV Solutions, Ericsson.

Cooney says: “The vision is straightforward, we see a converged TV world and what we mean by that is an individual TV experience.  The statement has been heard before, that of any content on any device, on any platform, at any time.  This embraces ‘live’, on demand, HD, the TV, the mobile device and potentially across satellite, cable, IPTV, terrestrial…you name it.  It’s a broad statement but compelling and reflects the way we see the industry developing.”

The core product underpinning ‘Business Solution 2.0’ is Ericsson’s own in-house middleware. Cooney says that IPTV has matured and the combined business is now ready with this ‘next generation’ product. One of the key elements of the IPTV middleware is that it comes pre-configured with open IMS (the IPTV multimedia sub-system) software, which frees the operator to choose from ‘best in class’ kit, of which there is now ample choice whether in servers, set-top boxes or conditional access.

“It has within it the Open IPTV Forum standard, or will have the moment they are finalised, anticipated before the end of this year. Those standards will then immediately be incorporated into our middleware. The business solution 2.0 is integrated with our VOD OpenStream product so our middleware product now has the depth and breadth of a full VOD system scalable to millions of subscribers. In many ways, we think we are leapfrogging the market with this system architecture thanks to its open standards, its scalability and the proven performance of our solution. We think it’s a pretty compelling story.”

Compelling it might well be. To date the market has been somewhat stifled in its choices and made life easy for the likes of Microsoft TV, despite Microsoft’s recent legal squabbles with Alcatel-Lucent, which used to be prime integrator for Microsoft. This Ericsson solution will be directly competitive to Microsoft TV and its proprietary system. The product should also put Ericsson/Tandberg in the lead in its now never-ending race against the Cisco/Scientific Atlanta hook up.

Cooney made one additional statement that’s worthy of discussion. “We will importantly have the ‘open message’ that is always important to us. We are happy to integrate and absorb all of the key components driven by a customer’s needs. I think over the next few years you’ll see two, possibly three suppliers in this space. Two will be strong and then there’ll be a significant drop off for the third, fourth, fifth and so on.  If I were a betting man and Ericsson and Cisco both have the capability of being those strong suppliers. Well… we’ll have to see how the others pan out.”

Source:rapidtvnews