Interview with Ervin Leibovici, CEO, Bitband

What sort of VoD content do you see out there in the IPTV market? Is it the same VoD content that you find with other forms of delivery?

The most popular content for VoD is recorded TV. You record the TV channels and you make that available on demand. The second most popular VoD content is movies. Local content is also becoming a big factor especially in IPTV services. These are the three major VoD content forms that are popular with IPTV users but none of these three are IPTV specific only.

What in your experience are VoD demand trends in emerging versus established markets?

In the US, the initial IPTV deployments do not necessarily have a VOD component. They rather focus on linear TV. You see more openness in deploying VoD in emerging markets versus the US where the traditional telcos have been more cautious about the introduction of new services. They typically go for linear TV first and then add some VoD and only later the real promise of IPTV services which is the new services over TV.

Are you involved in any hybrid offerings such as Verizon that is offering the VoD component over IP and the rest over legacy network?

We have a few customers in Israel, Far East and Europe, where the channels are being delivered over the air – either over satellite or over digital terrestrial – and the interactive on-demand content is delivered over IP connection through DSL or FTTH. We definitely see the hybrid approach as a trend.

When you evaluate central office of a telco for possible IPTV deployment, what would you ideally want to see there? What are the ingredients of a suitable telephone plant for an IPTV deployment?

We would like to see downstream speeds of 6mbps and ideally 10mbps. We would like to have an indication of the quality of that access because video is not very receptive to bandwidth constraints. Telcos do not have the television expertise in-house. We look for the telco operator to be aware of the complexities of putting out the television services. Once we find such a customer which has the right infrastructure, bandwidth and quality set-up, the right mindset and openness to introduce the TV service, we then enter in not only with our products but also with all of the expertise that we have gathered over the years.

How many VOD deployments do you have now?

We have over 50 deployments worldwide.

How do you handle the quality issues within a legacy central office setup?

We have introduced a product which is focused exactly on that: correcting quality issues over the last mile over a variety of network elements or components to make sure that the video quality which is delivered over the television is good.

Have you had any scalability challenges so far or in practice it has not surfaced as yet?

We have not yet stumbled upon it in any significant way. I think we have close to one million IPTV subscribers served by our platform at the operators. We have not yet encountered scalability issue and one of the reasons for that we have a very flexible architecture whereby not only the video delivery is distributed but also the management of that distribution. So we don’t really have any central bottle neck in our architecture.

VoD servers get deployed in each of the central offices rather than having something centralized. Is that right? And therefore it is logical to assume that we are not going to see that many scalability problems? Each central office serves about 10,000 lines and that is what you have to scale up to.

You are absolutely correct. But it is not simple when you have a country with 50 or 100 million people which has 20 to 50 central offices and a number of headends with 30 to 40k titles. Then you have tens of thousands of streams going in parallel. This is becoming a major challenge from the technology side.

I keep hearing from service providers that integration is still an issue with IPTV? Surely there must be standards forums out there that define standard interfaces.

There are de-facto standards. No industry wide multi-lateral standards that can be implemented. So I think this is one of the impediments definitely. Every deployment is in some way a little bit different. It is very hard to create a blueprint, a copy paste from one integrated solution to another. The paradigm right now is partner, partner, partner. So there are a lot of permutations between out there and BitBand is part of many of these.