About 10 years ago, Ericsson decided to make a push into the TV and media space. Flash forward to 2015 and the company is coming off a particularly busy month of September. Ericsson bought Envivio, announced a partnership with AT&T to help in combining its U-verse and DirecTV technologies, made commercially available its MediaFirst TV platform, and updated its VOD Infrastructure solution—not to mention won its sixth Technical and Engineering Emmy, this one for its work with “Closed-loop Statistical Multiplexing of Geographically Distributed Encoders.”
CED spoke with Elisabetta Romano, head of the TV & Media Business Unit at Ericsson, ahead of SCTE Cable-Tec Expo about Ericsson’s TV plans.
Which aspects of the TV market is Ericsson most focused on now and how does the Envivio acquisition play into that?
Ericsson is very strong across broadcast, satellite and telecom markets, and have made recent moves into the large Cable segment. Envivio is strong in cable and telecom compression markets and strengthens our leading position for compression in broadcast and satellite. The combined areas make us the global market leader in video compression. This acquisition strategically gives us the best capabilities by augmenting the hardware based approach that we already have with the pure software based component that Envivio provides.
How does the Envivio deal impact Ericsson’s work on its virtualized encoding concept?
Our Virtualized Encoding concept and the software defined video processing overall strategy that we have is fully ready to abstract the business processes and resource management of encoding with the underlying technology, whether hardware or software. The Envivio software technology is going to be an immediate compliment to this concept.
Can you elaborate on the work Ericsson is doing with AT&T to combine its U-verse and DirecTV technologies?
We are selected as their integration partner to bring together the best of these platforms and operating companies and the video expertise they have built. We are leveraging the Ericsson Mediaroom platform and unifying the capabilities of AT&T U-verse TV with DirecTV to create a new, scalable premium TV platform built for digital content.
What are the distinct challenges in meshing satellite and IPTV technologies?
The greatest challenges are around unifying the experience in all scenarios and presenting a common and consistent user experience across all devices. And, really making it truly invisible to the end user that different delivery networks and specific technologies have been used to securely deliver broadcast and on-demand content.
What new functionalities can subscribers expect once the U-verse and DirecTV platforms are combined?
Of course the future outlook is for AT&T to announce to the markets in their own time, but of course it’s logical that the best of content and access to content will be unified across the global reach of satellite and the powerful capabilities that on-demand and IP delivery of video can also provide.
What are some key differentiations of Ericsson’s new MediaFirst platform?
The MediaFirst platform truly enables TV service providers to be ultra agile in innovating and delighting the end TV consumer, by adopting cloud and web technologies and continual development models that have been embraced on the web and by some of the new OTT players. Our customers tell us they want and need to be so much faster in keeping up with consumer demands.
How have operators been using MediaFirst? What functionality does Ericsson envision MediaFirst enabling in the future?
MediaFirst is a cloud-based application and deployed as software as a service. We work in constant partnership with the customer in order to help drive their evolution to next generation platforms at their pace. It’s a flexible and scalable implementation so we can leverage existing investments that the customer has already made. We announced just weeks ago at the IBC 2015 that Telus will enhance Optik TV with Ericsson MediaFirst.
Can you go more in-depth on the features of Ericsson’s new VOD infrastructure solution?
The new VOD infrastructure helps to simplify the VOD architecture and enables a seamless experience for the end user. It is a pure software infrastructure designed to support increased streaming capacity and is able to achieve massive scale out capacity and architecture, helping TV service providers develop a multipurpose platform and bring real value to the end user. It gives the provider the power to handle additions ranging from TV Anywhere VOD, Multiscreen and OTT VOD, Catch-up TV and live to VOD in all formats up to 4K UHD, depending on the provider’s needs. It is also based on the Ericsson Video Storage and Processing Platform from Ericsson that underpins over 50 percent of the world’s cloud DVR deployments, making it the ultimate platform for processing, storing and streaming of video for on-demand applications
