BitBand, which sells on-demand IPTV infrastructure, is unveiling at GLOBALCOMM what it said is the first program restart capability for IPTV.
The company is also is introducing an end-to-end IPTV solution – with partners Amino, Latens and Minerva – for rural telcos in the United States.
While Time Warner Cable is offering a network-based DVR service called Start Over – a time-shifting option that allows subscribers who tune in to a program after it’s started to watch that show from the beginning – BitBand CEO Ervin Leibovici said his company’s solution brings similar functionality to IPTV networks.
BitBand at GLOBALCOMM also will highlight its other network-based DVR capabilities as well as its H.264/MPEG4 functionality.
Leibovici said the six-year-old BitBand at the show also is talking about its success stories with service providers in Europe and Asia, including FastWeb of Italy; Magnet Entertainment, the consumer division of Magnet Networks Inc, of Ireland; Telenor and Bredbandsbolaget (B2), which is now owned by Telenor, of Sweden; and Versatel of Holland.
BitBand has been working with FastWeb since the beginning of its IPTV deployment, when it had just a couple of servers, said Leibovici, adding that the large competitive service provider now has hundreds of servers across Italy.
Most of BitBand’s success stories are from Europe and Asia, but that’s primarily because those are the areas of the world where most of the IPTV action is, said Leibovici. He said he thinks IPTV has been slow to launch in the States largely because the market is waiting for AT&T Inc. and its middleware provider, Microsoft Corp., to make good on their promise to roll out Project Lightspeed in a significant way.
In the meantime, BitBand has partnered with some other vendors to deliver an end-to-end IPTV solution in an effort to make it easier and more affordable for rural telcos to get into the game. It’s also added DBS providers to its target market and expects to begin its push into the cable TV space – which will move more into the IP realm with DOCSIS 3.0 – early next year, Leibovici said.
In discussing the DBS space, he mentions that satellite TV providers need to “participate in the IPTV platform,” but don’t have interactive capabilities, and noted some DBS providers are partnering with telcos in a hybrid DBS/DSL scenario. Of course, AT&T is doing just that through its partnership with EchoStar’s DISH network.
BitBand’s core products include Vision, a family of appliance-servers that stream on-demand rich media to end-users over IP, and Maestro, a distributed content management suite that enables service providers to manage large, geographically distributed networks of servers. Maestro also interfaces to other service provider systems such as billing, authentication, content asset management, etc.
BitBand www.bitband.com
