Rising above the IPTV noise

“I will never look at a PowerPoint again. Unless you plug it into my network and show me, I won't believe it works. I won't believe your product.” When a telco representative said this to Meir Lehrer, vice president of technical sales for NDS, he took it to heart and trashed his presentation slides. Lehrer knew that the market was sick of hearing the “noise” surrounding new product launches — they just wanted an IPTV product that works.

“People have been burned by so many years of promises that it is very difficult to get your message out now,” Lehrer said.

The message NDS wants to spread is that Microsoft is not the only powerhouse for end-to-end solutions. NDS, a self-proclaimed low-noise company, is ready to take on the software giant with its latest IPTV offering: the NDS Metro, a high-definition digital video recorder (DVR) launched at TelcoTV in Atlanta. The DVR will be deployed in Amino AmiNET530 set-top boxes (STBs) powered by Metro middleware. SES Americom will be the first customer to integrate the HD DVR solution into its platform.

“A lot of people have already ceded the market to Microsoft, so it is important for them to know that there's another large network out there,” Lehrer said. “Microsoft just announced they have 168,000 set-top boxes deployed. We do that in a week. We have a fairly good feel of how to deploy systems, and we are trying to offer a compelling experience in IPTV.”

Customers are also more than ready for an alternative to Microsoft and are ready to pay for it, Lehrer added.

The middleware and conditional access solution will provide a complete end-to-end turnkey offering for telcos and broadband operators. NDS has been in the IPTV market since 1999 and has a total of 78.6 million STBs, of which 78.6 million have DVR functionality.

“We had the first end-to-end, one-stop, scalable solution in the U.S.,” Lehrer said. “We will be around to support our customers, and we are ready for the chance to be able to.”