Meir Lehrer, NDS VP US Technical Sales and Partnership Program, recently met with a group of analysts and journalists in the US. Two of their main questions were “Who is your competition?” and “What do you provide?”

According to Lehrer, the short answers are: “The competition these days is Microsoft. As for what we provide, it’s turnkey IPTV solutions.”

Let’s look at these one at a time.

Microsoft positions itself as a supplier of end-to-end IPTV solutions, Lehrer explains. “The problem is they have deployed fewer than 200,000 set-top boxes.” By comparison, NDS has deployed CA/DRM for 78.6 million STBs, middleware for some 69.9 million STBs, and DVR clients for 8.8 million units worldwide. “The point is,” he says, “NDS provides a turnkey solution in a market where few other vendors have the experience to do so.”

What is a turnkey vendor?

Lehrer explains that turnkey vendors take charge of end-to-end integration for the platform operator. “For example, we spent most of 2007 as the prime integrator for STBs for several operators in the US. NDS was in charge of managing the integration of chipsets (also called SoCs or ‘systems on a chip’ in the US) and STB vendors.”

"We were responsible for debugging new SoCs,” he says. “In other words we tested, reproduced and dealt with bugs that may have been found in a lab or at the customer site. Sometimes testing can be tricky because the bug may be in the product or in the lab environment’s configuration.”

What provided the impetus for NDS to become a turnkey vendor was the introduction of Metro™, its end-to-end IPTV solution.

Metro is based on two NDS building blocks: MediaHighway^® middleware and VideoGuard^® conditional access/digital rights management.

“We undertook the extensive testing because of our role as primary integrator,” Lehrer says. “We also made certain that the headend infrastructure – middleware, CA/DRM, EPG and interactive applications – all integrated correctly with third party vendors.”

“Been there; heard that”

“The challenge with working in the IPTV market is that operators have heard all the hype,” Lehrer says, “and they’re extremely skeptical.” He cites the case of one operator who simply refused to look at another IPTV presentation. “He told me he wants to see how the system works – not what you can say about it.”

The skepticism about IPTV presentations is well founded. IPTV is definitely an all-too-ubiquitous industry buzzword. Search Google for “IPTV Internet Protocol” and in the blink of an eye you get almost 1.4 million hits. “But the number of systems that are actually deployed doesn’t reflect this high profile,” he says.

To make certain that Metro works, NDS opened an “end-to-end Metro lab” at its site in Costa Mesa, California. “This lab enables us to reproduce and deal with any problems and certify upgrades under the footprint of SES AMERICOM, our key IPTV customer in the US.”

During 2007 NDS also set up integration labs in France, the UK, India and Israel. “The purpose of these labs is to facilitate product development and testing – in addition to investigating and dealing with any potential bugs – for different Metro components. This enables us to ensure that the solution works smoothly regardless of where the different parts of the system were developed,” Lehrer says.

During the year NDS also extended a VPN to its integration partners including STB vendors, IP multiplexer vendors, billing system vendors and VOD solution providers.

Deploying the IPTV solution for SES AMERICOM in the US presented a number of unique challenges. “In this case NDS is supporting both variable bit rate (VBR) and constant bit rate (CBR). This is first IPTV deployment that features a full complement of MPEG-2, H.264 (MPEG-4), standard definition and high definition (HD) broadcast and On Demand content.”

SES AMERICOM is an aggregator which means that “the NDS network architecture had to be able to accommodate hundreds of telcos all connected to a central headend where the majority of the processing occurs.”

The solution's ultimate test

In addition to the integration labs, NDS took another crucial step. “We checked to verify that the completed product actually works in consumers’ homes,” Lehrer says. “This added another layer of complexity – resolving IP networking and installation-related issues. But that’s what turnkey vendors have to do. To ensure the success of the SES AMERICOM system launch, we even have full-time on-site staff at the customer site.”

The fact is, Lehrer explains, “NDS is committed to delivering an end-to-end IPTV solution.”

“The reason it’s beneficial to use an end-to-end system from a turnkey vendor like NDS is that the alternative is to go to a different vendor for each of the system’s components. What happens to operators who choose this route is that at the end of the process they have a variety of pieces that have to be glued together.”

“There are cases where vendors may choose what they determine to be the best of breed in each space,” Lehrer explains. “The problem is that these components often use different technologies. Having been in the IPTV market since 2000 NDS is able to put it all together and make the system work.”

“IPTV deployment presents a number of challenges,” Lehrer says, “partially because the platform is still evolving. What we’ve seen during the past year is that because of our track record with STB deployments, systems integration, middleware and CA/DRM, no one is in a better position to fulfill this essential role.”

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Metro