CED: What did you see as the most important technical takeaways from this year’s SCTE/ISBE Cable-Tec Expo from Ericsson’s perspective?
Simon Frost, head of media and marketing communications at Ericsson: The three topics that stood out most were the readiness of ultra HD video solutions, interest in 5G and mobile-specific solutions and virtualized solutions for deploying in the cloud.
CED: What were the main pain points engineers visiting Ericsson’s booth were looking to address?
Frost: Booth visitors wanted to address a variety of topics associated with our vast portfolio but we saw two questions pop up quite frequently: 1) How cloud-native solutions and microservice-based applications can be deployed to deliver a differentiated end viewer experience; and 2) How wireless technologies including 5G and WiFi can enhance the proposition of the MSO.
CED: Ericsson was involved in the Innovation Avenue area on Expo’s show floor showcasing how cable operators can reduce unnecessary power consumption in the headend and in the network in conjunction with the principles of SCTE/ISBE’s APSIS standard. Will you speak to that?
Frost: We’ve been working closely with Liberty Global on energy efficiency in the context of the SCTE program. We’re bringing our key capabilities and learnings from our Radio Networks’ solutions and how we envision this in the future as we move towards 5G. Additionally we held a presentation in the theater at the SCTE Expo where we presented the details on the energy efficiency savings we have materialized globally.
Additional phases of our joint program with Liberty Global are under development. We’re exploring a wide array of topics, including how to apply energy efficiency capabilities to the Ericsson Radio Network of Cable and Wireless in the Caribbean.
CED: Will you expand a bit on the recent announcement about Ericsson’s integration of the cloud-based MediaFirst TV Platform with the Reference Design Kit (RDK)? How do you view integrating the platform as growing in relevance for cable operators and other pay TV providers?
Frost: Shortly before IBC we announced a new initiative to integrate our cloud-based MediaFirst TV platform with RDK. This will support Ericsson video delivery and playback, including support for Ericsson digital rights management. IP video support can be managed (multicast) and/or unicast playback of OTT or on-demand content streaming. Additionally, we will offer RDK support for the MediaFirst user experience – a cloud-based, multiscreen UX that allows the operator to author once in the MediaFirst TV platform and deploy across set-top boxes, web clients and mobile devices.
We believe that this will give operators much more flexibility and control over the user experience than in the standalone RDK. It also allows the MediaFirst platform to serve as an alternative back-end to the Comcast-controlled X1 back-end. Other Pay TV providers (non-cable MVPD’s) will now be able to choose the RDK client ecosystem if they are not interested in developing and managing their own set-top box system, or going with one of the other STB ecosystems.
