“Croatia is the trial country for our future network structure,” said Dr. Oliver Friedrich, senior expert New Media, T-Labs, Deutsche Telekom.
The operator is testing cloud delivered TV services in the country using a virtual Set-Top-Box approach, powered by ActiveVideo’s Cloud TV H5 solution. “We have a zoo of set-top boxes in the DT group,” so the question for the operator is “do we still need this dedicated piece of hardware or can it be integrated in the TV set?”
The German operator has multiple services in a number of countries including Croatia, Greece, Hungary, Macedonia, Slovakia, Montenegro, Romania so cutting down on the hardware does make sense.
Operator’s STBs are strategic control point, both technical and customer wise, but they are also an annoying cost factor and a potential innovation barrier for quick launch of new services, Friedrich said. “There is no real choice, for us the browser is the most important thing, whether it’s running locally or on the Cloud”
DT’s future services will support own, HbbTV and third-party HTML5-based services. To this end, the company’s research division T-Labs has been testing on Greece’s OTE network with “friendly users” and now has made Croatia into the test bed for its future networks across its footprint. “What we do here is testing in the scalability of platform in a fully virtualized, IPv6 environment”
There are still lots of issues to be solved before the company can move to a full STB-less cloud based environment. “We are not done finally with STBs.”
There are strategic issues, such as the landing page – is it controlled by the CE manufacturer or the platform? Who will be maintaining these platforms? For DT it is simple: “We have zero tolerance – TV must work.”
Deutsche Telekom is now moving the browser environment from local devices to the cloud. Virtual STB makes it possible that service quality and richness are not dependent on end devices or lcoal SDK anymore, which leads to a simpler end device and clients on different mobile devices and tablets.”
“It’s time to get started with IPTV on TV”, Friedrich concluded.
More information about the trial can be found in Broadband TV News passim.
