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Posts tagged ‘myrio’

Feb 22

Don’t put a stake in the ground

My friend Kelly Smith over at Curious Office has blogged about a Financial Times article about the need for flexibility in any endeavor, but certainly any Internet related business.  It really is a great article and the FT has some great content, so head on over (free subscription required).

From the FT article:

The quest to develop the internet’s next big thing can be full of unexpected twists and turns. PayPal, the online payments service, started as a way of transmitting payments securely between Palm Pilots. Its founders realised that there was an even bigger opportunity in online payments – and went on to sell the company to Ebay for $1.5bn (£767m).

Flickr, the photo website, grew out of a multiplayer online game being developed by its founders. Game Neverending never saw the light of day, but Flickr went on to be acquired by Yahoo, sparking a wave of interest in “Web 2.0″ sites.

“None of the big internet successes were like that,” he says. “If you want to build a great consumer internet company you have to be willing to try as much as you can, as fast as you can.”

We learned this at Myrio where our business plan changed several times during our early days.  The core idea was video delivery using IP and we knew we had to be disruptive.

We originally wanted to deliver video to enterprise customers, but that appeared to be a crowded market and getting more so each day.  Companies such as Cisco, RealNetworks, Microsoft, Apple and others were all vying to deliver CEO speeches and enterprise training videos over corporate networks.  Dead end for us.  So our model changed.

So we endeavored to stream real-time broadcast TV and VOD over IP (IPTV), and we made it work.  Much to the surprise of some very big companies (we even used their gear which they believed wouldn’t work).

Once we had it working, we knew we couldn’t waltz into a cable company and say, “Hey, we have a better way to do what you are already doing.”  A cable company wouldn’t simply switch to IPTV.   We needed to disrupt what cable companies were doing and we needed allies with networks and subscribers.  So we took our idea to PacBell.   Nada.  Sure they had networks and subscribers, but they lacked a key element.

So our business model changed again, and we found allies with subscribers, capital, and an entrepreneurial spirit in the independent telecommunications companies in rural America.

During all of this, our core remained, but our business plan was flexible and we hired excellent people (see earlier post: When Good Isn’t Good Enough) that could execute against a new idea.  We also utilized small teams of developers which allowed us to pivot quickly to meet the requirements of each market segment.  Again from the article:

[sic] Ooga Labs, a self-funded start-up whose 15 designers and engineers work in two-man teams to develop ideas in parallel. The goal is to churn out as many promising ideas in as short a time as possible.

[sic] “You can shrink the teams down to two people – a designer and an engineer. The smaller you go, the faster it goes.”

Please share your thoughts and ideas.

Oct 31

Goodbye Myrio

Myrio Logo

Dear friends and colleagues,

As I depart Nokia Siemens Networks (Myrio was acquired in 2005 by Siemens and is now subsidiary of Nokia Siemens Networks), today marks the end of an era for me–11 amazing years.

When we started working on the technologies that became Myrio, we had a
dream that one day companies all over the world would be delivering TV
services over IP. We were certainly not clairvoyant enough to predict how,
what is now called IPTV, would develop over the coming years, but we knew
the power of Internet combined with entertainment would create amazing new possibilities. Although IPTV seems so “well duh” now, this was not the case–even just 5 years ago.

I want to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for
believing in Myrio and the possibilities it created. We could not have done
it without you!

In 2005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford.

Full text:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Youtube:

YouTube Preview Image

I want to share a short excerpt from that speech. He said, “You’ve got to
find what you love. [sic]. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life,
and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great
work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you
haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the
heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it
just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you
find it. Don’t settle.”

Myrio and IPTV have most certainly been a labor of love.

As I sign off, I extend my best wishes to all of you.

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish.

-ryan

Mar 16

Sizing up the IPTV Experience

Sean Buckley of Telecommunications magazine writes that one quote from the IPTV World Forum in London really stood out for him. That quote, from Accenture’s Arjang Zadeh, stated “quality, not content, is king.” Well, yes and no. It is not that simple, let me explain.

Why would such a quote stand out in Mr. Buckley’s mind? Well, as he goes on to explain, it hits home for him because of problems he encounters with his current provider, Comcast. Fortunately, one of the problems Mr. Buckley describes with Comcast, the transient but eerily predictable, “timeout” error when trying to access the On Demand service, can most likely be explained as an artifact of delivering a two-way service over a network originally designed to support one-way video. Press, On Demand again, and everything works fine. Strange.

IPTV is not immune from “strange” quirks either. In fact ANY digital service is subject to these “quirks”. You see with an analog TV signal (really any analog signal, but we are talking IPTV here) there is a graceful degradation of quality–without entirely interrupting the video program. Remember snow? Depending on the strength of the analog signal you have a really great picture or you have a less than great picture but you have one. In a digital system, digital cable, satellite or IPTV, the degradation is less graceful. Depending on what bits are lost, the picture may still look great, there may be “macroblocking” or the picture may drop entirely. Any of these digital artifacts may occur to cable, satellite or IPTV. Our experience in the field showed us that subscribers that came directly to IPTV from an analog service (Off Air, analog cable) were more sensitive by the digital artifacts. Those that had previous “digital experience” were less sensitive to the artifacts. Makes sense, now.

Without describing in full detail all the of mechanisms available in an IPTV system to ensure Quality of Experience (QoE), suffice it to say, there are several just at the network level which ensure the reliable delivery of packets to the IPTV STB. Of course, IPTV benefits from its inherit support of two-way traffic (unlike the CATV network to which two-way capability has been added).

Furthermore, QoE depends not only on the effectiveness of the network (core, transport, access), but the experience provided by the software platform. Just ask any subscriber of early stage IPTV deployments. Our early customers and their subscribers suffered through painful stages of learning–ours and the service providers–as the industry learned to deliver video over the telecom network reliably. These are the pains I have recently written about for the AT&T Uverse deployment.

However, content is an integral part of QoE and cannot be excluded from analysis. What we (my employer, Siemens Communications) have learned from our leading IPTV customer Belgacom, is that content remains king. This is where I believe I part ways with Messrs Buckley and Zadeh.

Belgacom learned is if licensing premium content was king, licensing exclusive content is like being the galactic emperor. Through their licensing of Belgian Premiere soccer, they attracted and more importantly retain subscribers. As you might expect from any relatively new technology, there have been QoE issues at Belgacom. However, understanding that great content is part of the overall QoE has been critical to the rapid success of BelgacomTV. A lesson for all IPTV service providers..

Jan 29

Tech Trends for 2007

Tom Giles from BusinessWeek explores the top tech trends for 2007. The article briefly discusses IPTV and the need to “keep it simple”. This is certainly easier said than done. With IPTV service providers anxious to differentiate their offerings from cable or satellite, the last thing they want is to keep it simple. In fact, our customer push us to deliver more and more functionality on more and more devices (STBs). Until a service provider has breakout success, and can define a winning service offering, the pressure to push the boundaries of hardware and software in IPTV will not subside.

Jobs and his nifty cell phone didn’t steal all the thunder building in Las Vegas, where eyes fixed on Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates and other executives who promulgated visions of delivering entertainment over the Internet through a technology known as Internet protocol TV, or IPTV. The technology’s boosters haven’t made much headway in the past in part because they’ve failed to make IPTV easy to use. That’s poised to change this year, writesBusinessWeek correspondent Cliff Edwards, so long as software, hardware, and consumer electronics bear in mind a simple lesson concerning IPTV: Keep it simple.

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Jan 6

Siemens vs. Microsoft on IPTV

Over at ITVT, there is a two part interview with representatives from Siemens and Microsoft debating their varying approaches to IPTV technologies and the market. Of course, I am biased as my team and I make many of the decisions about the Siemens approach to the market as well as many of the technology choices in our solution.

It will be very interesting to hear the Microsoft marketing machine as they respond to our perspective as captured in part one.   The Microsoft marketing machine has typically done a very good job in “responding” to critical reviews of their IPTV solution.

For those of you who don’t understand the approach Microsoft has taken in IPTV, it is classic Microsoft..  Take the best ideas from the market leaders (embrace), and modify the established approach to enhance your competitive position (extend).

For IPTV,  Microsoft used several plays from this well worn playbook. For example, Microsoft embraced much of the established ideas in IPTV, but they created a new feature they call “instant channel change” (ICC).  Before Microsoft came into the market, no one knew they needed  ”instant” channel change, but Microsoft’s marketing team has convinced many telco executives that they must have ICC.  In my view, this is not exactly the kind of disruptive feature a telco needs to convince a customer to leave cable or satellite and move to IPTV.

What Microsoft does not tell customers, is that to achieve a nearly instant channel change,  it requires a completely proprietary broadcast architecture, deviating from accepted IPTV architectures, with extensive and costly use of unicast, and a complete dependency on Microsoft technologies (codec, DRM, streaming servers etc.).  Complete technology lock in and reliance on Microsoft.  Who really benefits from instant channel change, well Microsoft, of course.  As we and others began to question the market value of such a feature, the market finally took a critical look at Microsoft’s approach.

In the end, the technological complexity (think cost, $$$) required by the Microsoft approach and the fact that it relies on Microsoft server software (which everyone knows is not even close to carrier grade), can not be justified by the business case.  Will instant channel change come to a TV near you, possibly, but a number of vendors have shown a way to achieve the same result by using a standards based approach–with no Microsoft lock in.

Instant channel change is just one example, but Microsoft has been very quiet about most of their competitive differentiators as of late.  Why?  Well, they are under the gun to get AT&T working beyond trial subscribers.

Of course the Microsoft marketing machine would have us all believe they have “launched”, well that is a matter of perspective.  My belief is that AT&T cannot deploy anywhere, anytime to any subscriber nor can they market the service at full speed because Microsoft is still working through service debilitating bugs and cannot show the scalability that AT&T needs to go full speed ahead.

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Nov 15

Belgacom hits 100,000 subs, a full year ahead of schedule

Siemens Home Entertainment’s largest European customer, Belgacom has hit 100,000 subscribers this month, a full year of schedule. See Belgacom press release. Forbes is running an article that also discusses this milestone and the cross-polination with Belgacom’s mobile division.

Congratulations Belgacom!

Oct 20

Siemens Tops Microsoft In IPTV Market

According to the most recent report from ABI Research, Siemens leads Microsoft in the worldwide market for IPTV right now, but the race has just begun. ABI just finished up a recent analysis of middleware vendors and found that Siemens was ahead of Microsoft in terms of bundling a broader set of technologies.

Siemens has been ranked at the top of the latest ABI Research Vendor Matrix.

Microsoft Corporation and Alcatel claimed the second and third spots in the company’s most recent evaluation of worldwide IPTV network middleware vendors.

The Vendor Matrix is an analytical tool developed by ABI Research to provide a clear understanding of vendors’ positions in specific markets.

Vendors are assessed by ABI Research on the important parameters of “innovation” and “implementation” across several criteria.

For this particular matrix, under “innovation,” ABI Research examined breadth of services/functions supported by the company’s solution, its interoperability with other solutions, the company’s technology partners, and the scalability of the solution.

Under “implementation,” ABI Research scrutinized the following criteria: the strength of the company’s customer base, brand identification, sales channels, regional/key market diversity, and its ability to package the solution in a broader end-to-end offering.

To view a list of the “top ten” firms in this Vendor Matrix, please visit IPTV Network Middleware Vendor Matrix. Registration on the ABI Research website (free) is required.

Access to the rankings of all companies surveyed is available to clients of ABI Research.

This Vendor Matrix forms part of ABI Research’s Multi-Channel Video Research Service. For a list of all ABI Research Vendor Matrices, please visit The ABI Research Vendor Matrix.

Founded in 1990 and headquartered in New York, ABI Research maintains global operations supporting annual research programs, intelligence services and market reports in broadband and multimedia, RFID and M2M, wireless connectivity, mobile wireless, transportation, and emerging technologies. For information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.

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Jun 29

2006 PLM Workshop in München

Friedensengel in MunchenJune 28 and 29th Siemens Home Entertainment held a semiannual PLM (Product Line Management) workshop in München. Check out the photo album here. Every 6 months, or so, the global Home Entertainment PLM team gets together to discuss our IPTV solution. We talk about what is going right and what isn’t, as well as plan for our upcoming releases. Most of all it is a great opportunity to meet face-to-face with our incredibly talented product management team — we all have a great time.

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Feb 6

Siemens Pushes IPTV

I was quoted by one of our IPTV partners on Techweb.

Tut Systems packetizes content from satellite broadcasters, such as TNT, CNN, and HBO, and makes it available for use on IP networks. Ryan Petty, vice president of product line management at Siemens Home Entertainment said the company also re-encodes the content into H.264, an ITU standard for compressing video.

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