TelcoTV: Comverse builds converged IPTV apps

ATLANTA--Comverse is not the first name that pops to mind when you think of IPTV, but the company does, in fact, have a history in the consumer video business, having developed the user interface for LodgeNet and other hotel video services, as well as being well-established in wireless applications, including ring tones, messaging and more.

Now it is leveraging all that, plus the value of two acquisitions – Kenan Systems, the BSS/OSS vendor it acquired from Alcatel-Lucent, and NetCentrix, a European-based application server company – to become a systems integrator in the convergence realm, pulling together IPTV, mobility and messaging.

The company is working primarily with middleware provider Orca to “put together an ecosystem from the satellite dishes to the set-top box,” said Tim Phillips, general manager of IPTV Americas for Comverse.

The goal is to create the soup-to-nuts applications set that enables IPTV providers to integrate telephony onto the TV, in the form of caller ID, user address books, presence capabilities and more, to add value to a video offering, Phillips said.

“We don’t do any [video] content negotiating, but we can do everything else, in terms of systems integration,” he said. “We can enable them to get top-line revenue and pull their VoIP and messaging to three screens.”

The company is coming out with a series of what it calls “communicators”--product sets that enable services on different media. Its first will be a PC Communicator, scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2008, which handles voice and messaging from a software-based voice client that ties in all the popular Instant Messaging services – AOL, Yahoo! and MSN – with a presence server, and registers the client with Comverse’s soft-switch as a phone number.

In the mobile world, cellular carriers are looking at the opportunity to sell dual-mode phones, with cellular and WiFi functions, that would take advantage of a free VoIP service in the home, over the local WiFi to keep the customer on the wireless network, racking up minutes, Phillips said. The PC Communicator can sync buddy lists from the PC with the cell phone and link the cell phone speed dial list to the Outlook contact list in the Network Address Book on the softswitch, creating an integrated messaging approach.

“We are taking this now to the TV screen with TV Communicator, the next product,” Phillips said. The product, which is in its first deployment with a European wireline carrier, enables consumers to do all the things they do today on their cell phones from the TV, including click to dial, messaging and speed dials. The next step is to do videoconferencing from the TV, something Comverse is trialing in Europe.

“You see this in Europe on cell phones already – a video conference call on a phone with a swivel camera,” he said. “You point it at yourself and you can see yourself and three friends on a video call.”

That can move to the TV as well, he said. Comverse’s Video Communicator product is still in development but will leverage the existing messaging capabilities and much more, he said.