NSN as an IPTV service provider
NSN must have great confidence in the public Internet to tell Light Reading that it is planning a 400 Kbps real-time application service under a purely hosted model! We are still struggling with an 8 Kbps VoIP application over public Internet, guys.
IPTV offered like SaaS. That is not an alien concept. There are companies out there offering Over-The-Top IPTV service. However (1) they typically serve a particular small geography having bandwidth/QoS arrangements in place with the IP network provider, and (2) they tend to be smaller service providers.
NSN is neither a small vendor, nor does the hosted IPTV imply geographical limitations. How far will that scale? SES-Americom, the biggest whitelabel IPTV provider, has probably not been able to secure even 100k IPTV subscribers so far. Whitelabel providers or the hosted IPTV wholesalers usually work with very small service providers who do not have the marketing muscle to sign up enough customers. You might get an occasional big provider but they leave the whitelabel arrangement once they have gained sufficient knowledge to do their own thing.
Some of the service providers that SES-Americom works with have managed to bring in a few hundred customers only. Surely that will not work for NSN.
To me, this is NSN saying that they have not been able to crack the tier 1 IPTV market … and therefore let us keep experimenting with smaller companies till IPTV starts to ramp up. A better strategy might be to acquire smaller vendors and try to provide an end-to-end solution. That is what most successful IPTV vendors have done so far.
