Interview with Lars Bengtsson, President and CEO, Kreatel

The following interview was held with Lars Bengtsson in April 2005.

How do you see the current state of the IPTV market?

We got into this business in 1999, and had our first customer in 2001. At that point we expected the market to take off, but that as we all know that didn’t happen.

Now we see increased activity in the IPTV market and there has been a shift in perspective of the key players in Europe, US and the Middle East. The incumbent telco’s are now all looking into the area. They are preparing, or have already taken the decision, to deploy.

These are large organisations, with a lot of marketing push, so we expect things to happen in a bigger way now. For example, with Telefonica in Spain, it took some time to get momentum, but now they have had great success in the market, and we expect the same to happen in other countries as well.

Today, we have twenty-five operators that are in a commercial phase today with us, including two in the Middle East, Fastweb, Telefonica, Telesonieria, Canal Digital and Viasat.

The main middleware providers we are integrating and deploying with are Ocra interactive, Alcatel, and Tandberg. Some of the telecom operators are building their own middleware and this is the case with a few operators.

In Asia we see a more simple box focus, where TV alone or with VOD is acceptable. On the other hand, in Europe the incumbent telco’s are looking for a very versatile platform where they can do a number of things; they are looking for USB ports and hard drives, and MPEG4 is the main compression standard. Many are also looking at Windows Media 9.

What opportunity does IPTV provide to be the home gateway?  How will IPTV technology evolve into home networking?

We see a few different scenarios in this field; we believe that the set top box has to be able to link up to some of the devices in the home. A clear area we foresee developing is the IPTV box linking up to the PC.

People that have a digital camera or video camera tend to store content on their PC, and would like to be able to transfer it to the TV. Therefore it also makes sense to have some sort of easy connection between the PC and the set-top box.

Looking more at PVR functionality, people want to store various types of TV content, and that can be done on the network itself, or locally with built-in hard-drives in the set-top box, or network connected hard-drives of different kinds. We believe that the set-top box has to be one of the connection points for the home network, and for devices in the home.

But we don’t believe the set top box can be used for everything. People are concerned about wiring in the home, and we are in discussions with a number of operators about integrating the set top box with the residential gateway.

Initially it looks very interesting, until you get to the wiring issues. From a consumer perspective, even if you want to sell triple play and bundle the services, the consumers may buy one service from you, and another from someone else. Then, if you build in the TV functionality and the IP telephony into the same box, you may have to bear too much of a cost from an operator perspective.

Will the ipTV set-top box be integrated with other devices in the home?

We see different possibilities, and as a supplier we have to have a choice for the operator. We do see the set top box being hooked up with other devices, and the functionality that we have in the set top box could be handled in a different way in the future.

For example, looking at multiple streams fairly soon in the home, and then you may want build a different architecture and have more intelligence in the media server and less intelligence in the set-top box itself.

How will handheld devices work with the iptv box?

There have been a few different things that have been discussed. On the mobile side there are more mms services, sms and video conferencing, and video telephony

But effectively, all the services that you now get on the mobile network you are going to want at home. The set top box is a natural place for at least some of those. When you are in the home IP telephony becomes important because you want to integrate with video telephony.

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