IPTV, clearly is the buzzword of the year, right along with VoIP, Skype and Podcasting. Read the newspapers and you can walk away convinced that it is just the messiah that is going to save Bells from their past, and propel them into the future. That indeed might be the case, but one decision that leaves me scratching my head: why are they relying on Microsoft’s ability to deliver its promised IPTV software platform. Microsoft has a checkered past when its comes to television, and other related efforts. It is prone to delay its product launches (Longhorn?) and even when they ship, the crust is not fully baked.
One large company that has found out the hard way is Swiss incumbent phone operator, Swisscom. Just before the long weekend started, the Swiss operatorsaid in a statement (as per Light Reading) that it would not be able to launch its Bluewin TV IPTV service during the second half of 2005. (Blue Win… anyone else see the irony in the name?)
“The commercial launch will not be possible in the second half of 2005… as it has become apparent that the technology currently available is not yet suitable for serial delivery, in particular since the set-top box has no internal hard disk and only one television channel is available.” (Press Release)
Microsoft and Swisscom say that the service will be deployed in the homes of Swisscom and Microsoft employees by end of 2005. In other words, even then it will still be a test service. I have been hearing of these problems for a while now, and in fact would have resulted in some heads to roll at Swisscom.
“This is a first-of-its-kind service as well as being a complex project involving many different technologies from various partners,” says Ed Graczyk, director of marketing and communications for Microsoft TV. “As is common with pioneering services like Bluewin TV, sometimes the pieces of the puzzle take a bit longer to put together than initially planned but we’re confident that the puzzle is coming together very well now and that Bluewin TV will launch commercially to a broad set of Swisscom customers in 2006.”
The problems, as I understand stem from the fact that at present the servers cannot support more than 500 households and even then it can offer one television channel. This is not good when competing with cable operators. Looks like that actually might be true. In his DSL Prime newsletter, Dave Burstein reports that SBC LightSpeed has slipped between three to six months, mostly because of Microsoft’s Demovare, which is proving to be a buggy even in in-house trials.
“[Swisscom] believes that roughly half of Swiss households will have access to a VDSL enabled access line by 2007, similar to SBC’s current plan… We believe that SBC’s commercial launch of IPTV could also be pushed back into 2006 from its original target of fourth quarter 2005,” writes John C. Hodulik, analyst at UBS Investment Research, (Light Reading)
Microsoft is the big unknown in this space, and RBOCs are putting a lot of faith in their middle-ware, Rich Thompson, analyst with Heavy Reading told me a little while ago. He points out that Microsoft is trying to make it all happen with fewer than 500 people. He very succinctly pointed out that marketing muscle is one thing, and R&D muscle is one thing. If the Microsoft experiment doesn’t pan out, clearly their are others waiting in the wings to pick up slack. Siemens bought Myrio for $50 million, and Chinese equipment makers like UTStarcom have already readied their offerings. Failure could be bad news for Alcatel, which has chosen to forego its own internal products in favor of Microsoft.
Om
just one remark: Bluewin has been the brand name for the Swisscom ISP for years. We decided to launch TV under this brand instead of the Swisscom brand that is heavily related to “old-fashioned” phones…
We can discuss the rest offline (in two weeks when we’ll meet).
Andreas
Creating an IPTV platform from scratch is a huge initiative for the bells which is why they *need* to count on external providers, they would obviously customize the offering to suit their individual needs. IPTV again, is a new concept and has the skepticism associated with it, but the way the TV watching tastes of mass markets are changing, certain features like on-demand stuff, DVR and sharing are features that IPTV provides seamlessly and with great efficiency (for starters).
Most of the folks involved with both the software development and systems have little operational experience with large scale computing systems. One of the chief technical challenges facing the industries looking at IPTV is how to scale out such systems. The best (cost and scaleability) answer actually has little to do with computer. The answer can be found in how streaming audio services have been scaled on the Internet. For that — look less to software vendors and more to streaming media provider (spinner, netscape radio, et. al.) for the answers …
Don’t forget about the recent ruling in Texas against the baby bells in this case – as if there weren’t enough barriers for them to get going, they now must be granted individual licenses for each city and town in order to run FTTP. So they’ve got problems on both ends – legal/deployment and software. The baby bells are clearly going to have a harder time rolling out video services than they previously imagined.
The promise of IPTV based services and the legal issues surrounding IP based video deployments are not related issues. The FCC is cracking down in VoIP now as you guys know, but internet telephony has already started showing its promise. Bottomline is that all telcos concur on the fact that video services are the future for them and they all seem to have done some home work on this, now not to expect bumps on the road with such a huge paradigm shift, would be foolish.
Nitin – Of course the two aren’t related….and in terms of “bumps in the road” – I think the ruling in Texas was quite a significant bump. How many years will it be before they can get a first version of a nationwide video network? How fast will cable be at that point by upgrading their equipment?
If they have significant problems deploying a video solution from a technology point of view, it will be very hard for them to gain customers in a highly saturated market.
Microsoft said its IPTV offering will be a complete end-to-end solution spanning a range from video management and delivery to consumer TV experiences
I came know that now British Telecom is going to launch IPTV service using Microsoft IPTV solution.
any comments from from anybody regarding this.
Yes.. I agree ..8