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By Zhou Qiaohe

After much wait-and-see, some exploration and a few attempts at commercial application in 2006, the global IPTV market is expecting rapid development in 2007, with many carriers conducting experiments, beginning to make trial commercial applications, and commercial applications. However, many challenges still exist in regards to the construction of the IPTV system platform, continuous service development, service operations, and management and maintenance.

The end-to-end IPTV industry chain is quite long. As is shown in Fig.1, it comprises of building the IPTV system platform, business planning, content provision and service release on the front end, along with the bearer and family networks on the rear end. In order to achieve success in the IPTV field, a carrier needs to be able to overcome challenges in all these areas.

Fig.1 IPTV E2E Integrated Solution

The challenge for IPTV system platform integration

The IPTV system platform covers the headend, middleware, media service, content protection, BSS and OSS subsystems. Numerous vendors are able to provide a few parts for each subsystem, but no vendor is capable of providing all the parts. Since the IPTV system platform is an integrated open platform, the carrier needs to give serious consideration on how to achieve high-performance, stable operations and inter-operations of integrated parts in the network, thereby ensuring high-quality service provision. The IPTV system platform implements unified dispatch and management via seamless interconnections between the middleware and other parts of the network. It is therefore, very important to enable such seamless integration.

Due to the importance the middleware plays in the integration of the IPTV system platform, many leading IPTV vendors such as Microsoft, Huawei and Siemens, as well as PCCW, have set up their own R&D middleware section, or merged with or acquired middleware vendors in order to guarantee seamless integration of the IPTV system platform.

For the above reasons, a carrier can effectively reduce its technical risks in the IPTV system platform, if it selects a system integration vendor that already has the middleware and integrates end-to-end systems as an IPTV partner.

In order to reduce overall network construction costs and difficulty in maintenance management, the IPTV system should be integrated with the existing OSS, BSS, and third-party systems of the carrier. Integration with the third-party STB (Set Top Box), in particular, can effectively reduce construction costs. For this purpose, the IPTV system platform must have open architecture and clear modular logic to simplify integration.

Since the IPTV system platform bears carrier-class services, high security and reliability is needed in order to guarantee future stable operations.


The challenge for continuous development of the IPTV service

IPTV is a platform on which a fixed network carrier can transform itself and become an integrated information service provider. Services provided by the IPTV system platform have to be expanded, from basic audio and video services, to successive rich value-added services, which can also include such services as information services, communication services, as well as voice, data and video integrated services.

• Basic audio and video services
  
  Basic audio and video services can include such services as live TV (including standard definition and high definition TV), time-shift TV, carousel, video-on-demand (VOD), and PVR /nPVR (network personal video recorder). In terms of IP technologies, live TV and carousel adopt multicast technology, while time-shift TV, VOD, and PVR/nPVR adopt unicast technology. These services present challenges in terms of multicast capability, traffic (bandwidth) impact and the QoS. The precondition for the bearer network in deploying IPTV service is that its equipment has to have multicast capability, traffic (bandwidth) impact bearing capability, and a QoS scheme, which are all vital for ensuring the quality of IPTV basic audio and video services.
  
  As far as existing bearer network equipment is concerned, routers, BRAS, switches, and DSLAM, offer insufficient multicast and QoS capabilities. Complicated networking modes and aging lines have also placed serious restrictions on network bandwidth and traffic expansion. Hence, if these problems are not solved, it is virtually impossible to guarantee the quality of IPTV audio/video services and system capacity.
  
  For a solution to the above problems one can adopt the following ideas. The first is to optimize and reconstruct the bearer network. The second is to select an advanced coding mode, proper system deployment scheme, and content distribution strategy for the IPTV system platform, in order to improve bandwidth utilization to a maximum, save bandwidth, reduce construction costs, and eliminate the system expansion bottleneck. A proper system deployment scheme can also help improve user experiences.
  
  
• Value-added services
  
  Although at first, basic audio/video services are the primary focal point in IPTV service, value-added services are likewise an inseparable part of the overall process, and will play a vital role in the future of IPTV. Therefore, in the early phase of deploying IPTV service, sufficient attention should also be paid to value-added services. Otherwise, the continuous development of the system could hardly be guaranteed. However, value-added services face three challenges.
  
  First, the system platform needs to be open and set the standard. Although the service mode and profit pattern of value-added services are still not clear at this point in time, more and more value-added services will be housed on the IPTV platform. In addition, more and more SPs and CPs will join the industry chain. This requires that the IPTV system platform – especially the middleware – have hierarchical, modular architecture and open interfaces, in order to quickly interconnect with third-party service systems.
  
  The second challenge has to do with customized requirements. Customization and quick response should be provided to handle differentiated service competition. The support and response provided by system integrators in terms of service customization determine whether or not an IPTV carrier can take the lead in the market.
  
  Third and last, is integration with the IMS. The IMS helps to define rich multimedia service capabilities, unified service management and the billing engine. Integration between IPTV and IMS will create rich and mature services. Furthermore, unified management and billing can reduce OPEX and improve the competition strength of carriers.

The challenge for operations and maintenance management

Since IPTV will have a long industry chain, the service operations, along with the service release and maintenance management of IPTV will prove to be more difficult than other services and systems.

First of all, in terms of service operations, telecom carriers face stiff competition from traditional broadcast and TV operators, who have a wide user base and coverage, and also have accumulated many rich experiences in service provision and operations. Most telecom carriers have only a limited amount of experience in this field. So to win in this type of highly competitive environment, telecom carriers need to cooperate with content providers in the upstream of the industry chain, in order to provide end users with local, differentiated and attractive programs. Such programs are the primary motivation that causes users to make selections in the first place. Telecom carriers should also have more flexible strategies, such as segmentation of target customers and services, and differentiated tariffs. Furthermore, they can implement content operations by referring to the experiences of traditional TV stations, run virtual channels and offer advertisement services based on cooperation with content providers. Such flexible operation strategies require flexible and complete support from the IPTV system.

Second, integration of the IPTV service platform and the network system has greatly increased the difficulty factor in terms of service release, system expansion and maintenance management. Since the IPTV system platform involves equipment from multiple vendors, the carrier might encounter numerous challenges as far as operation and maintenance is concerned. Some major problems include work efficiency, fault location and response speed in maintaining such equipment. Several other questions are often asked as well, such as how can equipment from different vendors interconnect and cooperate in order to automatically release services in the network; how can such equipment guarantee support for user number allocation; and how can the system be expanded smoothly?

In order to solve these problems, IPTV needs a unified network management system to manage the end-to-end IPTV system and network equipment, which would help to improve efficiency and reduce costs. In addition, an expansion of the system must be implemented together with an expansion of network equipment, bandwidth and topology, to guarantee the smoothness of the system. Since the provision of new services will most likely create the need for frequent upgrading, the STB terminal must be able to support automatic online upgrading. These requirements are oriented to the maintainability of the IPTV system and will test the capabilities of system integrators and carriers as well.

Huawei's end-to-end IPTV solution offers a whole-process solution and services, including business consulting, deployment of the IPTV system platform, evaluation, optimization and reconstruction of the bearer network, as well as the home network. The open IP system platform, which adopts self-developed middleware and the media service system as its core parts, also integrates (third-party) headend receiving, monitoring and the advertisement insertion subsystem, CA subsystem, and STB subsystem, which effectively reduce system integration risks, while at the same time ensuring fast deployment of the system. Furthermore, the open, flexible architecture can help to reduce system construction costs and protect investments. In addition, integration between the IPTV system and the IMS system offers support and guarantees for the continuous development of the IPTV service. To date, this solution has been adopted to deliver more than 10 commercial application offices worldwide, and the application experiences accumulated from these deployments can help carriers handle any challenge they might face in future IPTV commercial deployment.