The company is late to the party but has chosen to partner its way in. It wants to satisfy its own Telco customers and compete against other major IPTV suppliers with something a bit different. By Steve Hawley

Leveraging IMS

Ericsson sees the key ingredients to this unified approach as leveraging the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), an area that Ericsson has focused on for some time, which is intended to provide control over mobile and fixed-line multimedia services while leveraging 3GPP standards. At a product level, Ericsson uses a device it calls an IMS Home Gateway, which is a small customer premises device containing an IMS SIM card to allow for IMS-based authentication.

IMS is a standardised architecture for telecommunications service providers that implements voice services using voice-over-IP (VoIP), based on a 3GPP standard-based implementation of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The 3GPP is a collaboration among standards organisations in Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea, to create a standardised architecture mobile telephone systems using the specification for the Universal Mobile Telephone System (UMTS). Ericsson expects that because it has based its solution upon internationally recognised standards, it will gain leverage in operators worldwide.

Access-aware

Ericsson comes to IPTV from an IMS perspective, having 19 major (announced) IMS and mobile video contracts worldwide. By using IMS protocols, Ericsson-based systems can use the same databases, including IMS subscriber data, billing, OSS/BSS, provisioning, authentication and charging. Also, they can use the control mechanisms of IMS to add new functionality, including IPTV. In addition, IMS is access-aware. If a user is logged in at home but decides to walk to the store, she can move the session from the television to the mobile device.

The company also has integrated IMS with the DLNA home electronics standard. DLNA, the Digital Living Network Alliance, is a collaboration among more than 250 consumer electronics, communications and computer industry companies; including Intel, Microsoft, Philips, Matsushita, Nokia, Philips, Samsung and Sony.

In fact, initial demonstrations of the Ericsson IPTV solution involved Sony. At the June 2006 GlobalComm conference in Chicago, Ericsson and Sony demonstrated several usecases: a DLNA-only case, using a mobile phone to pass pictures and MP3s between the phone and a TV; a pure IMS case, sharing video from the mobile phone to a TV; and an application applying parental controls across devices for similar applications. Other use cases included an IMS interaction with DLNA, to watch vacation videos on a phone, and a UMTS network interaction, using a phone to log into a DLNA home network, to listen to MP3 audio files located on a laptop at home.

To provide command-and-control of the TV experience, Ericsson partnered with Kasenna, whose IPTV service delivery platform provides content distribution and lifecycle management and allows operators to implement the system, provision subscribers, activate and deactivate services easily. Kasenna was chosen not only for its product attributes, which include open APIs and ability to run on multiple platforms, but also because it is one of the few remaining IPTV middleware companies with a product that is architected for integration and is still independent.

Single headend

In the Ericsson IPTV solution, all content can be generated from the same headend, whether targeted to a fixed or mobile device. The headend equipment used in the demonstrations came from TANDBERG Television. Although Ericsson has been in the Kasenna relationship since 2001, officials would not disclose the names of customers, but claim it is close to making announcements. Ericsson officials also were careful not to paint themselves into a “Tier-1 only” corner, noting that it has received RFPs from operators of many sizes worldwide.