HD, mobile video and new applications dominate this year’s offerings.

If you can’t get your fill of video entertainment at NXTcomm, you aren’t trying hard enough. All forms of video is a dominant theme this year, as telecom service providers branch into managed video services for consumers, competitive service providers seek to differentiate in business video offerings and Internet video becomes an opportunity and challenge for the entire industry.

On the IPTV front, middleware vendors are crowding the show floor, seeing the U.S. as a ready market for technology that has debuted elsewhere, while a number of equipment vendors are displaying end-to-end solutions that address the integration problems, which have slowed IPTV to date. In addition, MPEG-4 technology is finally commercial at the set-top box level and will be widely used to display HDTV, a booming market in the U.S.

The three-screen strategy—seen mostly in AT&T commercials a year ago—is alive and well on the show floor as well, as integration of TV, PC and mobile phone screens, in some cases set against an IP multimedia subsystem background, steps into the center ring of the IPTV circus. Converged applications also will be in the spotlight, as IPTV moves beyond video to communications and messaging, commerce and more.

To date, the dominant middleware players in the U.S. have been Microsoft, via its AT&T connection, Minerva Networks and Myrio Corp., now part of Nokia Siemens. At NXTcomm, however, the choices of IPTV middleware abound, including Grass Valley (owned by Thomson), Kasenna, Seachange International, and UTStarcom.
Grass Valley and UTStarcom are both bringing middleware technology that has been successfully deployed in Europe and in China as part of their end-to-end IPTV deployments. Grass Valley will have headend gear, middleware and set-top boxes that include the expertise of its parent company, Thomson. UTStarcom has its own end-to-end approach, the RollingStream IPTV system, which includes streaming servers, middleware, set-top box and a conditional access system/digital rights management system (CAS/DRM), but it will also integrate with other set-top box and CAS/DRM makers. The system is deployed in China by both China Netcom and China Telecom, with close to 300,000 subscribers total, and in Japan by Softbank.

What sets UTStarcom’s approach apart is the end-to-end integration and its use of media streaming to distribute content through a hierarchy of servers to a relatively low-cost and simple set-top box.

“That means you can stream to any device,” said Brian Caskey, vice president of worldwide marketing for UTStarcom. “It can go to a PC, a set-top box or a wireless device. We think just going to a set-top box hard drive is the wrong model.”

UTStarcom also has its own Universal Broadband Server IP-DSLAM, which the company has successfully sold in Japan, India and Europe.

Grass Valley is showcasing a new Advanced Compression Processor called Mustang that delivers “a tremendous amount of horsepower,” said Jean Macher, director of marketing for video solutions. Based on an extensive R&D effort, the company has developed a new ASIC that replaces the multiple digital signal processors that most vendors use, he said. Grass Valley can deliver MPEG-4 compression that delivers full HD resolution at 5 Mb/s, enabling HD content and multiple standard definition channels to be delivered over an ADSL pipe.

Grass Valley will also show off its Sapphire video-on-demand (VOD) server, which it has been deploying in Europe but is new to the U.S., Maher said. “We are ranked number one in Europe for VOD in number of streams deployed and number three worldwide,” he said.
Grass Valley’s SmartVision middleware has been deployed worldwide for four years and is widely used in Europe, including by France Telecom, which has 1 million subscribers on it today, Maher said.

Kasenna will have Living Room 2.1, an updated version of its Living Room middleware on view. The middleware will incorporate some of the key enhancements the company did for its recent benchmark testing with HP and Intel, which showed Kasenna’s system could support 1 million IPTV subscribers.

“We are going to be demonstrating the Portal TV suite along with a demonstration of the back end of Living Room, which we haven’t done before,” said Scott Mirer, director of product management for Kasenna. “We will show how easy it is to re-skin the middleware for customization. A lot of people want to see how to change skins and customize the product.”

Seachange is focusing on showing telecom service providers how to deliver new applications and services, said Venkat Krishnan, Seachange’s director of marketing for IPTV solutions. The company also will showcase its new Electronic Programming Guide (EPG). The EPG has not sold in the U.S. prior to now because Seachange had to negotiate a licensing deal with Gemstar.

“We now have a license to sell in the U.S.,” he said. “We do have installations across the world, including Virgin Media in the U.K., India and Moscow.”

The Seachange MultiVerse EPG will be targeting PCs as well as set-top boxes, he said. “We will showcase critical technology from an applications standpoint such as games on demand. You can go to any gaming technology provider ... [and] games can be downloaded or streamed. Plus, games can run on mobile devices, the PC or the TV.”

Another new service, DVD on demand, takes a physical DVD and converts it into a streaming asset, he said. “You deliver streaming DVDs in a video-on-demand infrastructure that includes the chapters, behind-the-scenes things, all the look and feel of a DVD, streamed onto any device.”

Of course, the current market leaders aren’t standing still. Microsoft, in addition to announcing a new branding campaign for its IPTV product, is also introducing the newest version of its Microsoft TV product, which will include Home Media Sharing, said Ed Graczyk, director of marketing and communications for the Microsoft TV division.

“Home Media Sharing will allow consumers to access and play back digital photos of digital music from your IPTV service when those things are sitting on a PC with Microsoft XP or Microsoft Vista,” he said. “This is the next step in this vision of connected entertainment.”

In addition, Microsoft is incorporating a browser in the client software, he said. “This now allows a local browser so you can have different live video screens on at once, and you can enable personal video portals or multi-view sports,” Graczyk said.

Nokia Siemens also is unveiling its new strategy in the third quarter, which will include Myrio Interactive Version 2.2.1, said Brook Longdon, vice president of operations and field engineering for Nokia Siemens Networks’ Home Entertainment unit.

“We will be showing pieces and parts of it at NXTcomm,” he said, “along with the integration of IPTV and mobile TV.”

The demos will include the ability to vote on music videos via short messaging service, with the vote registering as an IPTV interactive application.

“I think as the operators are becoming better at becoming entertainment companies, they are more focused on doing applications,” Longdon said. “Eight years ago, the concept of telcos even offering video was different. They were focused on acquiring content and learning how to do TV. Now you are seeing even the newer ones, as they come to the table, dealing less with becoming a TV company and focusing on what they can do beyond TV.”

Another major trend for IPTV at NXTcomm will be the integration factor. A number of exhibitors will be showing end-to-end integration of IPTV, proving the technology can scale and that newer applications can be layered on top, and linking mobile content as well.

Alcatel-Lucent, which teams with Microsoft in helping AT&T deploy its U-verse service, is focused on showing how to “create a complete IP experience where you can find and connect with the brands and people you care about,” said June Bower, vice president of marketing and entertainment in the converged business group at Alcatel-Lucent. “We will show a day in the life of a subscriber and how that individual can get content from the TV, watch it on a mobile device, get appropriate content to a game console or an iPod and interact with content in a way that is meaningful to them.”

The company will show a new version of its mPower mobile content platform that “lets carriers market to their subscribers in the area of mobile data, putting together campaigns based on brands,” she said. “They can show brands on the phone, connect off-portal sites on the portal, instead of having them sit as another store, and create an overall better user experience for the subscriber.”

A key part of Ericsson’s end-to-end IPTV strategy is showing how using IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) infrastructure can tie together networks and devices in video applications.

Using real IMS nodes, the company will show messaging interworking between IMS-enabled and non-IMS-enabled devices. In one demo, a child watching IPTV at home can attempt to order a movie and be blocked by the parental control system, which then sends out a text message to a parent’s cell phone, asking if the child has permission to view the requested content.

“We are adding communication on top of other services,” said Eliot Freed, marketing manager for Ericsson. “This is running over real IMS nodes that we have, and we will be showing more of a three-screen strategy.”

Cisco Systems, with its Scientific-Atlanta and Linksys acquisitions, has an end-to-end strategy that goes from the set-top box through an IP network to a video headend. A key differentiator is support for multiple types of middleware, said Pankaj Gupta, senior manager of marketing for IPTV/video marketing at Cisco.

“Our IPTV set-top box platform—and that includes the complete set-top box family—will support Microsoft, Myrio and Minerva,” he said. “Our solutions do not lock you in with certain middleware.”

This year at NXTcomm, smaller and independent telcos will find much of the technology for which they have been waiting on display on the show floor, including new competitors for their business and new end-to-end IPTV solutions.

In the latter category, SES Americom and the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative have teamed on IP Prime, their end-to-end IPTV solution that has been in beta trials with rural telcos and will shortly be a commercial offering. And Falcon IP/Complete is exhibiting what it calls “Bird to Box” television.

Both companies are delivering MPEG-4 compression, a significant factor for rural telcos as they try to deliver more bandwidth over longer loops.

“We spent three years developing this solution, and we are now starting to deploy,” said Don Cook, president and CEO of Falcon. “We are doing it from the satellite all the way to the set-top box. We have our own in-house engineering, installation and tech support, and we can do the DSLAMs in the access and all the integration.”

At the core of his system is Grass Valley technology that has been widely deployed in Europe, including the SmartVision middleware and Thomas MPEG-2/MPEG-4 set-top boxes.

IP Prime has been tested by its beta customers and is very close to commercial launch, said Bryan McGuirk, president of media and enterprise solutions for SES Americom. His company will be showing two end-to-end ecosystems, one built around Myrio middleware, NDS conditional access and SA set-top boxes and the other using NDS middleware and conditional access delivered to an Amino set-top box.

Being able to mix and match vendors is important to rural telcos, to “future-proof” their deployments, he added. “It creates a competitive market that allows our telco partners to really choose best of breed,” McGuirk said. “That’s what our open standards platform has been about from the beginning.”