Minerva playing up “independent” status

Like virtually every other vendor in the IPTV market now, Minerva is playing up its ability to play nice with others and interoperate. The latest, announced at the start of the IBC Show in Amsterdam today, is an alliance with i3 micro technology.

The agreement will bring together i3’s Mood 300 IP set-top box with Minerva’s iTVManager middleware. The combination also is another in the growing line up of Minerva alliances focused on MPEG-4 AVC compression, which most believe will be the telco’s technology of choice.

What makes Minerva slightly different, though, is its new status as the last remaining “independent” middleware vendor.

“One of the things that’s happened recently is that with Myrio being acquired by Siemens and Microsoft taking their position, and Orca and Lucent being lumped together, Minerva is viewed by developers as the only independent platform to work on,” said Matt Cuson, Director of Product Marketing for Minerva.

Using that status to its advantage, the company is signing agreements with a slew of vendors. At IBC, which runs from today through Monday, iTVManager will be operating in several other vendors’ booths including security vendors Widevine, Latens and Irdeto, access vendor C-Cor, set-top box makers Amino and Thomson, and VOD vendor Bitband.

“We need to kind of hedge our bets,” Cuson said of all the alliances. “Because this is the IP space, this is open and so the nature of the Internet space is companies will find ways to innovate and still plug into a system.”

And while independence has its advantages at this stage of the IPTV market, Minerva isn’t a big enough company that it can work with every partner.

It’s all a question of the roadmap and customers that [potential partners] are able to find,” Cuson said. “We’re not a charity. We’re motivated by the customers they can bring us.”