TelcoTV: Thomson exec warns against ‘bells, whistles’ syndrome

ANAHEIM, Calif. – The IPTV industry may be on the verge of repeating one of its first mistakes, Thomson Director of Marketing Fabien Maisl warned here at the TelcoTV show.

“I see a lot of hype around widgets and chat on TV and that sort of thing,” Maisl said. “Today we need to be focusing on the quality of experience and making sure it works -- that fast-zapping works, that the video quality is perfect -- because we are going head-to-head with cable and satellite, and they have video right already. The issue is having it working properly today, and getting [high-definition] encoders with very high compression to work and getting fast-zapping to work without using hundreds of servers.”

That last comment was aimed squarely at Microsoft, Thomson’s major competitor globally for IPTV middleware, but Maisl is also addressing the smaller independent operator market, where Thomson is hoping to gain more traction here in the US. Smaller operators have struggled getting basic features such as HD and digital video recording to work with their existing vendors, and Thomson is hoping to convince more of them to switch to its platform, promising rock-solid performance.

Maisl says the company is already seeing multiple switchovers in Europe, where early adopters have become disenchanted with their first choice of IPTV platform.

“A lot of service providers in Europe are interested in changing for several reasons,” Maisl said. “They have so many issues with their current setup, they are now getting to the second generation type of service, and now have the expertise to make a better choice, and now that their IPTV technology is working, they want to put in more features like fast-zapping, content recommendations and targeted advertising. In some cases, the middleware they went with isn’t able to deliver a new service layer to generate new ARPU [average revenue per user] or it’s too costly to operate because it requires too many servers.”

In most cases, if the operator has relatively few subscribers, they are willing to scrap the first IPTV system deployed and move on, Maisi said. As widely reported already, this happened in Luxembourg, where Thomson replaced Microsoft in providing the incumbent carrier’s IPTV platform. Increasingly, however, IPTV service providers with larger deployments that decide to switch providers are capping their existing investment, moving new customers onto a new provider such as Thomson, and then migrating older customers over to the new system as they ask for newer features.