Ericsson has announced plans for a successor to the Mediaroom operating system it acquired from Microsoft last year. The MediaFirst TV Platform will be made generally available from Q2 2015.
In the meantime there will be enhancements to the current Mediaroom platform that generally put it on a par with current trends.
MediaFirst goes a stage further with a personalised, cloud-based system, which genuinely provides that elusive seamless experience between mobile, tablet and the big screen in the living room.
There are also plans to make the product available to cable networks, as well as the existing IPTV platforms where Mediaroom has been present to date.
Mark Russell, CTO, Product Area Mediaroom, confirmed to Broadband TV News that current set-top box deployments would be capable of running the new MediaFirst, allowing operators an easier path to upgrade. This is made possible because much of the considerable horsepower behind it will reside in the cloud.
Russell is part of the team acquired from Microsoft last year. It had become clear Microsoft had lost interest in the product, though development of MediaFirst had begun under Microsoft ownership, helped by Ericsson’s February 2014 acquisition of Azuki Systems.
There are elements of catch up in all senses in the enhancements to Mediaroom. Features such as true restart TV – effectively a backwards EPG – and unified search are not revolutionary, but Pete Thompson, senior vice president, Mediaroom Business Group, Ericsson said the new features returned to the heritage of Mediaroom, making it clear Ericsson would continue to invest significantly in the product.
Ericsson MediaFirst TV Platform – previously known as TV Three – is based on an open and standards-based approach and architected to be cloud agnostic, enabling delivery on public and OpenStack private clouds.
“If you go back to the original vision of Mediaroom we were pushing the industry. We were telling them that all IP systems can work and that was the future and now it’s time to push the status quo again and come back and say we might need a whole new infrastucture and come up with a migration plan,” said Thompson.
“Media first is true TV across all screens. I like to think of it as a white label Netflix, so we’ve provided the toolset for the operator to be able to go at that web speed, and adding live TV to it. “Ultimately the consumer wants these things together. You make a change and it goes to all the back screens.”
Personalisation is key with the living room TV display capable of recognising individual logins and a sharp contemporary graphical and picture based look.
The product is currently in trial with selected operators.
