Telco TV Stars: Orca, PeerTV, Skitter.TV

As I noted in my earlier post, it was not all doom and gloom at TelcoTV last week. There were a few bright spots, all having to do with hybrid IPTV/OTT video solutions. Here are the highlights:

Orca Gets It

Kudos to Israeli IPTV middleware company Orca Interactive for their deal to build a hybrid IPTV/OTT solution for CTV International, a new service provider offering ethnic content to ex-pat communities around the world. Ethnic and foreign-language content is a great application for OTT video, which is best suited to niche or long-tail content to customers across wide geographic areas. This deal also shows that Orca “gets it” about the potential the OTT market has as a disruptive force and a revenue stream for innovative vendors and service providers.

The new service offers local language national TV programming and video content on the viewer's PC or Set-Top-Box (STB) via the Internet. According to Orca, the service will be one of the first live deployments in which an IPTV middleware has "crossed the lines" to support a fully OTT service. The initial service will target Israeli communities around the world.

What remains to be seen is how well Orca will be able to embrace “Internet rules” when it comes to building a lightweight and customizable solution. IPTV middleware is notoriously bloated and closed, in large part because of the carrier-grade requirements dictated to STB and middleware vendors by large service providers (who have no interest in anything too open or anything too innovative that might “break” their systems). At the same time, middleware vendors like Orca know a thing or two about human factors and user interface design, although many of the designers I know are frustrated by the ancient tools they get to use.

It will be really interesting to see how well Orca blends core IPTV apps like live TV, network DVR, Pay-Per-View, and VOD with OTT apps and an interface that looks good on both the TV and PC (and mobile handsets in the future). This customizability was a major reason for CTV selecting Orca so we will be following how well they deliver on this promise.

Read the full press release here.

Is PeerTV Peerless?

Fellow Israeli company PeerTV also made a splash at the show (can we all take a moment to say thank you for all the fine technology that has come out of the Holy Land?). PeerTV was in the booth of their US partner PathFinder demonstrating a hybrid solution that can stream both live TV and VoD content via an OTT connection. They are a Trender Research client so I can’t disclose too much, but suffice to say that PeerTV has one of the most powerful Internet TV platforms we have seen. Not only does PeerTV embrace “Internet rules” in terms of flexibility and service creation, their system takes away much of the up-front investment that makes IPTV deployments so expensive. Leveraging one of PeerTV’s delivery partners such as PathFinder and a CDN, broadcasters and service providers can quickly deploy a low-cost and scalable OTT service to subscribers anywhere. The system supports 1080p, a wide variety of video formats and streaming technologies (WMV, MMS and RTSP), and supports progressive download based on optional internal FLASH memory or HDD (improving smoothness of video playback in bandwidth-constrained Internet networks). I could tell you more but then I’d have to… you know.

Skitter-Hitter

To complete the triple play of innovation we bring Skitter.TV into the batter’s box. Skitter is a new middleware and head-end system that blends broadcast and satellite TV with Internet TV content and video on demand. Skitter says its system can capture content from any source, encode in HD and SD (NTSC and QAM support), manage customer access rights, and stream HD and SD multicast using MPEG 4 AVC. It also claims to support multi-screen offerings for TVs, computers, and smartphones.

What most caught my eye is Skitter’s strategy for delivering converged traditional TV and OTT video. Skitter will be able to take over the air (OTA) channels and blend with OTT content, and stream all this to a wide variety of STBs using variable and adaptive bitrates (unicast and multicast). In fact, Skitter showed us a demo using Roku’s box (via a recently announced API from Roku). Amazing!

But before we get too excited, we should wait to see how Skitter’s first deployments go. Skitter’s solution sounds a bit similar to ZillionTV, which recently laid off staff and delayed the launch of its own hybrid solution by a year, and Sezmi, which also blends OTA and OTT content and like Skitter requires a complete overhaul of the traditional Pay TV delivery system, including new head-end equipment, STBs, and content partners. Skitter does have a content partnership with NTTC though, so that should help Tier 2/3 telcos negotiate content deals quickly. But I am always worried about new companies spending the first crucial minutes of their “elevator pitch” explaining how the company got its name, which is what Skitter reps did at their booth (the name is built off an acronym of the founder’s last names- SKS). We did the same thing at Tundo and well, that didn't end well.

Speaking of founders, here is Skitter president and co-founder Robert Saunders giving a demo at TelcoTV. Enjoy.


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