Ericsson’s involvement in Mobile World Congress (MWC) extends beyond the Barcelona show’s telco focus, illustrating the renewed wave of convergence with television.
According to Simon Frost, Ericsson’s head of media marketing and communications, we’re currently witnessing a ‘jostling in the value chain’ that ultimately leads to a focus on the end consumer.
“It’s all about great content and what we want to consume. It’s about the access and how it plugs into our lives,” Frost told Broadband TV News.
When operators start to talk about the ability to stop watching a show on one device and pick it up again on another one, Ericsson is ready with the tools for such seamless experiences through network infrastructure and mobile internet. Frost admits that current coverage is not without its gaps. “We get used to talking about the ‘anytime, anywhere’, but there’s still a lot of engineering challenges underneath that promise and whoever delivers that will have real success”.
Frost points to LTE Broadcast, being demonstrated at MWC with the Australian operator Telstra, which he says is still not being generally deployed. Use cases extend beyond the traditional areas to include breaking news, disaster relief, education, live events and health applications, as well as software app and firmware updates.
Ericsson is now entering the CDN business with a dedicated Unified Delivery Network (UDN) as an ecosystem that’s running in partnership with several leading global service providers including AIS, Hutchinson, Telstra and Vodafone.
“From a telco point of view this allows Ericsson to bring together the technologies on their behalf and broker the [content] deals,” said Frost.
For those that had forgotten about Mediaroom, the TV platform acquired from Microsoft, Ericsson have a new customer. Its deployment with cable operator Aster in Dominican Republic comes alongside video compression solutions and an agreement with Cisco to add, Evolved Converged Cable Access Platform and Hybrid Fiber-Coaxial solutions, to be integrated by Ericsson’s services professionals.
