Tandberg Television News:

--OpenStream Platform Wins Technical and Engineering Emmy
--Company Hires Two New SVP's
--Secures New Deals with DirecTV, UPC, Swisscom, Time Warner Cable

Tandberg Television--the company which over the past two years or so has purchased VOD infrastructure provider, N2 Broadband, interactive TV technology and services provider, GoldPocket Interactive, IPTV content delivery company, SkyStream Networks, and Internet video company, Zetools; and which was itself recently acquired by Ericsson--has generated a fair amount of news over the past few weeks. Recent interactive TV, VOD, and IPTV-related announcements from the company include the following:

• The company has named Terry Lee SVP of sales and Ian Tapp SVP of business development. Lee will be responsible for driving revenue and leading the company's Americas sales team, while Tapp will be responsible for expanding the company's business in the Americas by developing and managing partnerships in the cable, satellite, telco and terrestrial broadcast markets. Both of the new hires will report to Al Nunez, Tandberg's president of the Americas. Lee, a 20-year industry veteran, was previously VP of North American sales for BigBand Networks. Prior to that, he was an executive manager at Scientific-Atlanta, responsible for strategic sales and business development for cable MSO's. His resume also includes stints as a sales executive at Texas Instruments and Amphenol. Tapp, meanwhile, worked for NDS for 13 years where, according to Tandberg, he played an integral role in establishing new business opportunities for the company in North America. He most recently served as the News Corp.-subsidiary's VP of business development and marketing, in which role he focused on the IPTV market.
• The company has been awarded a Technical and Engineering Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its OpenStream Digital Services Platform (which it acquired through its purchase of N2 Broadband). The award--which is officially for "development, productization, and commercialization of interactive video-on-demand two-way infrastructure and signaling, leading to large-scale VOD implementations"--will be presented at a ceremony during next January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. According to Tandberg, the OpenStream platform has enabled rapid deployment of VOD and implementation of commercial VOD business models by enabling service providers to easily deploy open VOD architectures. Operators that use the platform can use best-in-class VOD servers, applications, billing systems and other system components, the company says, thus avoiding "single-vendor lock-in." The company also touts the platform's open architecture as "extend[ing] the headend beyond VOD to support television's next generation of interactive services." Customers of the platform include China's Oriental Cable Network, Holland's UPC, US MSO's, Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable, and the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC). Tandberg claims that over 80% of on-demand content seen by US cable subscribers is made possible by its VOD solutions.
• Satellite TV provider, DirecTV, has deployed the company's WatchPoint workflow management and automation solution to manage its new, multiplatform (set-top, Web and mobile) VOD service. (Note: Tandberg bills WatchPoint as a scalable workflow management system that streamlines and automates the creation, management and distribution of media assets to multiple platforms, thereby reducing expenses. According to the company, the solution enjoys an open, extensible architecture that integrates with multiple in-house and third-party systems for content management and distribution; provides visibility and control over multiplatform video offerings by effectively processing multiple types of content in multiple types of format, such as MPEG-4 AVC high- and standard-definition, Windows Media and Flash video; adapts to customers' existing workflow processes; and scales in volume and complexity to support new service offerings.) According to DirecTV, the DirecTV On Demand service, which is slated to launch this fall, will offer customers thousands of movie, music and TV titles via the DirecTV Plus HD DVR. "The flexibility of WatchPoint enabled us to customize the platform to support our individual workflow process and make our DirecTV On Demand service a reality," Hanno Basse, DirecTV's VP of broadcast systems engineering, said in a prepared statement. "Tandberg Television simplified a complicated process by automating our entire on-demand workflow, so we could focus our efforts on delivering a compelling line-up of video-on-demand services to our customers." DirecTV is also using a number of other Tandberg technologies to power its new VOD service, including its compression solutions and its Xport Producer content-production solution.
• The company says that Liberty Global-owned pan-European triple-play operator, UPC Broadband, is using its technologies, along with technologies from Motorola, to power its new VOD service in The Netherlands. According to UPC, the service, which has already been deployed in a number of locations, will reach over 500,000 UPC video subscribers by the end of the year. Tandberg provided UPC with its OpenStream Digital Services Platform, and also served as lead integrator on UPC's VOD launch: it says that a team of its VOD engineers and systems architects worked closely with UPC's engineering team to provide systems integration, including the incorporation of components from a number of third-party vendors in addition to Motorola. Motorola, meanwhile, has provided UPC with its B-1 video server to stream MPEG-2 content. The server is billed by Motorola as separating storage of programming from streaming, thus allowing operators to independently scale content libraries and streaming resources at a fraction of the cost of legacy servers.
• The company says that its iPlex UltraCompression standard- and high-definition IPTV headend, which it debuted at the recent IBC show in Amsterdam, has passed interoperability and qualification testing for Microsoft's Mediaroom (formerly known as IPTV Edition) IPTV software platform--meaning that the new headend can now be deployed in tandem with the Microsoft software. According to the companies, this latest integration of their technologies marks five years of collaboration between them (Tandberg was one of the first companies to integrate its encoding solutions with Microsoft's IPTV platform), and will deliver "a comprehensive solution for new revenue-generating IPTV services with more channel choice, as well as the efficient introduction of HDTV and on-demand video offerings over DSL and FTTH broadband networks." According to Tandberg, operators can now choose from a wide range of Tandberg encoders for HD and SD MPEG-4 and SMPTE VC-1, as well as select broadcast 1RU or telco chassis-based options, which have qualified for interoperability with the Mediaroom platform. The iPlex UltraCompression IPTV headend, which is based on Tandberg's AVC platform, is billed by the company as combining the broadest choice of density and enhanced features with industry-leading picture quality, and as enabling bandwidth efficiency improvements of up to 50%. The company is positioning it as a "flexible video processing platform, rather than just being an encoder chassis," and says that it supports MPEG-2 SD encoding, MPEG-4 AVC HD and SD encoding, MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 transcoding, MPEG-2 transrating, and picture-in-picture service generation, all in a high-density, NEBS-certified telco-designed chassis.
• The company says that incumbent telco, Swisscom, has chosen the new iPlex UltraCompression IPTV headend for the next stage of its Microsoft-powered Bluewin IPTV service. The Bluewin service has used Tandberg compression technologies since its trial launch in the fall of 2004 (it launched commercially last November). "Tandberg Television has been our partner throughout our IPTV journey and we are pleased to continue to work with them as we enter the next stage of our development," Felix Graf, head of TV and portals at Swisscom, said in a prepared statement. "Tandberg Television has pioneered advanced compression, lowering the bandwidth required for delivering television over DSL and enabling IPTV business models to become a reality. We are deploying Tandberg Television's best-in-class technology to enable the expansion of our IPTV service and continuously improving its quality, while still maintaining flexibility and efficiency." The Bluewin service currently offers, among other things, around 120 linear TV channels, over 80 radio channels, and around 500 VOD movies. It also allows viewers to search for and record programs, select them for later viewing, and pause them during transmission.
• The company says that Time Warner Cable is using its technologies to power a VOD solution for small markets. According to the company, a "unique configuration" of its OpenStream Digital Services Platform allows Time Warner to manage VOD services from its headquarters in Denver, and deliver content via satellite to smaller markets throughout the US; while its Xport Producer platform allows the operator to provide local VOD content tailored to each of those markets. The small-market VOD solution has to date gone live in four markets--Clarksburg, West Virginia; Dothan, Alabama; Fort Benning, Georgia; and Terre Haute, Indiana--and the operator plans to expand it to 10 additional cities--Coeur D'Alene, Idaho; Cullman, Alabama; El Centro, Calif.; Greenwood, Mississippi; Kennett, Missouri; Moscow, Idaho; Owensboro, Kentucky; Richlands, Virginia; Richmond, Kentucky; and Yuma, Arizona--by the end of the year. "Tandberg Television's powerful architecture helps us provide enhanced television services to our subscribers and expand our video-on-demand offerings to parts of the country not previously possible," Dick Amell, VP of engineering at Time Warner Cable's National Division, said in a prepared statement. "The flexibility of Tandberg Television technology to interoperate with multiple VOD servers, billing systems and on-demand applications from our Denver headquarters was a key reason we chose its solution to support our VOD deployments thousands of miles away." According to Tandberg, its OpenStream platform enables "tremendous cost savings" for large operators looking to deliver VOD to small markets. The company claims the OpenStream solution, which also incorporates its MediaPath Secure Content Delivery System and Asset Management System, facilitates the deployment of VOD services using satellite catcher technology, and a multi-vendor mix of VOD servers, applications, billing systems and set-tops; it can be configured to suit operators' on-demand requirements and remotely managed from a central location to avoid traditionally cost-prohibitive bandwidth requirements, the company says.

Originally Published: October 12, 2007 in [itvt] Issue 7.39 Part 2A

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