“The true beauty of IPTV lies in its interactivity and easy expansion”  

Interview with Weijun Lee, VP of Network Architecture for ZTE USA

Mr. Weijun Lee is responsible for global technical marketing of ZTE's Core Network solutions including IPTV, Value-Added Services (VAS), and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Weijun has more than 15 years of extensive industry experience in Canada and USA in multiple areas of telecommunications including switching, wireless, optical, IP, VoIP, and network management in the functions of system design, software development, network planning, and business case analysis.  We spoke to him at the recent IPTV World Forum, held in London last March.

ipTV News: What do you see as ZTE’s particular strengths in the IPTV equipment market?

WL: We are very uniquely placed to engage with the IPTV market – we have probably the most extensive product portfolio of any vendor and offer solutions for the IPTV, optical, wireless and wireline industries, among others.  The benefit of doing that is we have first-hand experience of the other sides of the telecoms industry – and we have more often than not worked with companies in other segments.  In the IPTV space we offer total solutions from set-top boxes to home networking to middleware and value-added services, with certain segments – for example headends – from specialised partners.

ZTE is a leading telecoms vendor and knows a lot about telco requirements – we can provide not only end-to-end solutions but also adequate customisations to increase the competitiveness of each carrier.  In these projects, for example Shanghai Media Group, the operators trust us to deliver to their requirements – we promise trustability and capability.

Once an operator selects an IPTV solution from ZTE, what is the path ahead?

Once an IPTV system or platform is in place, that’s just the beginning – the evolution of IPTV allows a carrier to offer more and more attractive value-added services, e.g. games, video telephony, distant learning, and TV shopping, to name a few.

What we have here is the evolution of IPTV itself – when the first operators introduced the IPTV service, it was a very barebone offering with just broadcast TV.  Later on, some carriers (e.g. PCCW) improved the appeal of their service by offering exclusive premium contents, e.g. ESPN.  However, the true beauty of IPTV lies in its built-in interactivity and easy expansion and integration with Web services. 

What could be the killer applications over IPTV for a new operator?

TV-on-Demand (TVoD) – The Shanghai Media Group (an IPTV operator in Shanghai, China) conducted a survey recently and found out that 58% of the current subscribers said that TV-on-Demand is the key deciding factor for them to choose the IPTV service over equivalent Cable TV service.  There are two key differences between the TVoD and the Personal Video Recorder (PVR) feature:

- With PVR you have to program the recording schedule, whereas with TVoD the programs are always there and always available without complicate programming.

- With PVR you can record only one or two channels, depending on how many tuners are built into each set-top box. And you can only record a certain amount of programs, up to the size of the local hard drive. With TVoD, there is no such limitation, and all programs in all channels in the last few days (as configured by the operator) are always available.

The best way to promote IPTV services is to make it a fashionable thing through the introduction of attractive value-added services, then the peer pressure factors will come into effect. The value-added services, for example TV-commerce, enable an IPTV operator to offer not a “me-too” service but inherently much better solutions.