Bringing disruptive technology to the IPTV Market: the scalability issue

As the subscriber base for IPTV services continues to grow significantly, the increasingly competitive converged market is opening up a new set of revenue opportunities. Service providers keen to benefit from the current state of the market are investigating the technology and solutions available that will allow them to cost-effectively deploy competitive on-demand TV services. In order to facilitate further business growth both now and in the future, it is essential for operators to deploy scalable and distributable on-demand architectures. As the IPTV market continues to evolve, traditional solutions are being challenged by new, disruptive technologies developed especially for the market.

Göran Appelquist, Vice President of Business Development at Edgeware AB, discusses the factors driving the need for scalablity and the technology required to allow operators to optimise their deployed IPTV server system with minimal impact on existing network infrastructure.

Until recently, the IPTV market focused on streaming linear TV-channels to subscribers, but with a shift to on-demand services taking place, networks are requiring an increase in bandwidth to maintain pace with the uptake of these new services. With the emergence and growth of bandwidth-hungry services such as VoD and in particular Time Shift TV and nPVR, it is no surprise that scalability has been identified as the biggest challenge facing the IPTV industry in the coming years. In addition to on-demand services, high definition content is becoming more prolific and drives bandwidth requirements even further. Alongside these technological developments, the subscriber base for IPTV services is growing worldwide. Currently over 13 million households subscribe to IPTV services worldwide, but global IPTV subscriptions are expected to top 65 million households by 2012¹. With the market opening up so dramatically, operators will gain competitive advantage if they ensure that they are prepared for a huge demand on their services by deploying scalable network solutions.

When IPTV was first introduced to the broadcast market it had to prove itself as a commercially viable delivery platform before seeing mass market uptake. For this reason, many of the early deployments utilised only the minimum number of servers and streaming capacity required to deliver a basic service to a small pool of users to minimise the initial investment. Now that IPTV is a proven platform with an increasing demand for bandwidth hungry services and a growing customer up-take, operators need to up-scale their service capacity.

Potential limitations on future bandwidth expansion exist for operators who have built their IPTV network over legacy telco networks that were originally designed for voice and data traffic only. These limitations, including bottlenecks in the network, must be addressed in order to facilitate further business growth to keep up with the rapidly growing market. In order for operators to ensure profitability in up-scaling its service capacity, it is no surprise that the commercial reality of deploying or upgrading an IPTV network demands that economics and scalability go hand-in-hand – the implementation of scalable solutions must be economically viable for the operator and cannot involve large CAPEX or OPEX.

Edgeware has developed its own unique server architecture, used in the Orbit 2x platform, in order to address the need for scalable solutions in an economically viable fashion. Designed for IPTV services delivered over both legacy and new-built networks, the Orbit 2x minimises the need for costly infrastructure upgrade. It can be deployed anywhere in a network, adding capacity where it will benefit the system the most. This avoids the common scenario where limitations in server technology restrict where operators can place additional streaming capacity, creating the need to up-size the entire network. The use of inherently reliable hardware and software is a key criterion in providing the freedom to locate servers in remote locations as part of distributed deployments. The main source of unreliability in legacy server systems is the use of hard drives. By replacing hard drives with flash memory integrated into the server architecture to best effect, this unreliability can be eliminated completely. Another advantage achieved through the use of flash memory is the ability to offer very high streaming performance from a single copy of each file. This is impossible with hard drives where multiple copies are needed to support large number of simultaneous requests. Because of the high capacity inherent in flash technology, storage and streaming capacity can be scaled independently and allows for very cost effective in-service up-scaling of streaming capacity, when needed.

Efficient deployments of scalable on-demand systems require decentralised solutions where distributed streaming capacity handles the majority of the requests through the use of edge servers close to the end-users. To successfully build decentralised systems, an efficient asset propagation system must be in place to ensure that the most popular assets are always available on the edge servers. To address this, Edgeware has developed its Convoy™ distributed asset propagation system. As all decisions are made locally in each server no external or centralised management resources are required. Operators benefit from a system that scales without limitations when the streaming capacity is increased.

As the IPTV market expands, operators must be able to offer their customers attractive, scalable and cost-effective on demand services in order to maintain competitive business advantage and long-term market survival. The implementation of distributable server systems is essential to allow massive up-scale of services and streaming capacity with minimal impact on existing network infrastructures. The industry is transforming from being technically able to provide on-demand services, to actually delivering commercially viable, large scale IPTV services that can seamlessly expand as the customer base grows. For operators, finding the best way to provide scalable solutions is the biggest challenge for the years to come.

¹ Source: IMS Research, IPTV: A Global Market Analysis - 2008