Many operators have chosen IPTV as their new opportunity

Now fixed operator is going through a very hard situation and it seems like this is going to last some time in the near future. Traditional voice services, their monopoly markets and the revenue that came along with it, are dead as we know it.  The statistics show that since 2000 global incumbent telecom operators have lost on average 5% per year of fixed line revenue. In addition, competition is abundant and CLEC’s, Broadband, Satellite, Cable, VoIP and Mobile providers are all firmly committed to the game.

There is however an opportunity to recapture or maintain market share and even in the long run increase revenue for fixed operators, which is IPTV.

IPTV is the culmination of significant changes in technology in the last ten years, specifically those resulting from the proliferation of Internet Protocol and broadband access. With these two factors, and of course many others, television can become whatever the consumer wants it to be. In the foreseeable future, TV will largely remain the act of watching something on a panel sitting in the living room, family room, bedroom, bar, or wherever, but the content and the experience will be entirely different. Single voice services are dead and double play services (voice and broadband) will only plug the hole in the dam for a short time - the future is in triple and even quadruple play services.

Now most experts and industry insiders agree that the convergence of digital media and information technology is inevitable, and there are many successful examples. Also known as “Triple Play”, this technology will allow service providers to offer and deliver traditional voice services, data/broadband services and video, over upgraded networks.  With the promises of mobility and 3G, ultimately “Quadruple Play”, or 4play will be the standard.  Some of the most recognizable and largest are AT&T in the U.S., PCCW in Hong Kong, British, France, Deutsche and Spanish Telecom in the European Union and China (Guangdong) Telecom in China.  In addition to the telecom service providers, there are a slew of lean and hungry competitors with bundled services and competitive pricing.

There are many problems during the IPTV development

Many service providers have been preparing for IPTV for years and saw the future in the late 90’s. They have been carefully preparing to evolve their networks to ones that can support triple play services and IPTV.
Just the same as the development of other services, IPTV service development will also experience various phases: Initial construction, trial commercialization, scale commercialization, mature commercialization and convergence & integration in the declination period. The IPTV service may be different from other services in that its comprehensiveness will make it much more complex than simplex services as compared with the construction and operation of the simplex services before. It deserves much more attention from us throughout its development.
  
How to deploy IPTV successfully?

Operators need to find a partner who has the End to End Integration and Delivery Capability and can provide open and standard middleware which can helps operators support customizing new application quickly and flexibly adapt the third-party API then can import new services quickly.  This open & standard architecture can help operator inducting competition and reduces cost.

During scale commercialization phase, operators need a partner who can provide a complete series of solution to solve the needs of various networks and enable the IPTV system to be deployed quickly with little change of the existing network which fully protects the existing investment of the operator. The IPTV partner also has to have the knowledge of how to full evaluation of network performance to eliminate bandwidth bottleneck and E2E multicast ability of optimization for BTV (core, aggregation and access network) saving bandwidth, then saving investment. The design of the IPTV solution also have thought about the E2E QOS guarantee to improve the end-users’ experience.

For deploy IPTV successfully, the End-to-End Security Protection is also a very important thing should be thinking about. The end-to-end content security protection solution is the key to enhancing the CP’s confidence and enriching IPTV service contents, whereas the end-to-end system security protection solution is the guarantee for the system to provide reliable and quality services for users. Methods such as access authentication and service authentication should be designed to prevent illegal users from accessing the system.

As a world-leading broadband equipment provider, Huawei has early sensed and grasped the broadband network development trend and requirement and positioned its IPTV solution as one of the four strategic solutions along with NGN, IMS and 3G solutions. Huawei IPTV solution focuses on every phase of IPTV industry development and offers an end-to-end carrier-class total network solution including background operation support, the headend system, middleware, the VOD system, DRM/CA, STB, the broadband bearer network and the home network for operators through close cooperation with the leaders of various fields in the industrial chain.

This solution covers all aspects including the operation support layer, the operation management layer, the content service layer, the bearer & transmission layer and the home network layer. It is designed to effectively integrate digital media resources, guarantee the security of contents, improve the media QoS and reduce the system operation cost, so as to offer a digital media entertainment management and control platform that has good adaptability and expandability to support the introduction of new contents, services and business models along with the deepening of resource integration and network integration.

Cases that operators succeed in deploying IPTV services
 
Maroc telecom is an operator leader in telecommunications in Morocco, providing comprehensive range of telecom services countrywide，whose market share of the fixed voice service is 100% and that of mobile service is 72%.

In 2005, Maroc Telecom initiated IPTV bidding project. Huawei won the project in virtue of the end to end solution and rapid turn-key capability, and built the advance H.264 IPTV commercial system as the equipment provider and system integrator.  On May 31st 2006, Maroc Telecom ceremoniously announced the IPTV service launched.

At the first stage, Maroc Telecom provides BTV service for 50,000 subscribers, mainly covering Rabat and Casablanca. In the world cup period, averagely 500 subscribers applies for the service everyday. The number of subscribers has climbed to 10,000 in less than one month time. So Maroc telecom carries second stage plan quickly intending to provide new additional Time-Shift TV and NPVR services and expand the system up to 200 channels and almost 200,000 subscribers. Now MARRAKECH,MEKNES,OUJDA,TANGIER,AGADIR, and FES, the six cities have already been preparing for the IPTV services for the second stage.

Huawei provided the world-leading end to end IPTV solution for Maroc Telecom, cooperating with excellence partners in IPTV industry spectrum to realize the turn-key delivery.

IPTV will lead the operators to success in the near future.

It’s already be considered in common that the IPTV will help operators to get out of the current situation, by reducing broadband churn rate, keeping and increasing ARPU, bringing a new revenue stream, penetrating to the content area and offering differentiate services from the other operators. Regarding that the technical implementation is not a problem at all and there are also many successful operation cases, more and more operators realize the advantage of IPTV and decide to take actions. This is not only a challenge, but also an opportunity. Huawei will accompany and help the operators to face this challenge and succeed.