Huawei: "This award provides great publicity and recognition"

We speak to Baber J. Awan, Marketing Director of IPTV solutions at Huawei, which won the category ‘Content, Entertainment, Applications and Services’ at this year’s Broadband InfoVision Awards for its IPTV solution.

Why do you think the judges selected your entry for this award?

Huawei provides a best-of-breed end-to-end Digital Home IPTV solution, together with business consultancy and content services, to support an operator’s IPTV business.

We believe the judges selected our entry for this award because Huawei’s IPTV solution is an excellent service innovation in the area of Content, Entertainment, Applications and Services which offered significant new prospects for increased revenue, managing costs, improving quality and increasing customer satisfaction.

What recent industry developments does it specifically address?

Huawei’s Digital Home IPTV solution helps the customer meet challenges and opportunities. It provides a customised Quality of Service (QoS)-based hybrid (IP+Cable/ Satellite/ DTT/OTT) TV solution for customers, which can combine digital entertainment, infotainment, interaction, and other advanced innovative Value Added Services.

Huawei’s IPTV Service Delivery Platform simultaneously supports IPTV and digital TV in one solution, providing consumers with interactive multi-screen services through multi-channel networks (IP network, mobile network, HFC, etc.). The platform makes the services independent of underlying network, and enables third parties and online developers to introduce their huge service offering easily.

Aiming to face the growing challenge of free internet delivery mechanism and consumer’s new expectations, Huawei IPTV Service Delivery Platform offers a future-oriented open platform based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which provides prompt network integration with legacy networks, a horizontal development environment based on cloud-computing framework with open IPTV & Internet capabilities, open service innovation with standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Service Access Gateways, connecting mass developers with a portal presentation for a unified experience and flexible business processor with BSS/OSS.

What plans do you have to improve it in the coming months?

IPTV is an emerging technology and will evolve into a completely interactive experience in the future. IPTV set-top devices will be the first step towards the true convergence of everything into a single IPTV platform, and that’s where the future really lies. These technologies will be in every house and business in the next five to ten years. You can either spend money on this technology or you can make money from this technology.

We are positioning IPTV as part of the Digital Home – the next evolution of IPTV. Converged with a Service Delivery Platform (SDP) and based on Content Delivery Network (CDN) cloud computing technology, Huawei’s IPTV product line is committed to providing connected home applications for consumers.

Huawei’s IPTV product line has the following plans and roadmap to improve its products, fulfil customer’s requirements and meet the future needs of the technology: Digital Shopping Mall, Video Surveillance, Conference Call, UGC and Mashup OTT services, Home Community & Host,     Home Unified Portal, Social TV (Facebook & Twitter etc applications on TV), Hybrid TV (IP+DVB-S, IP+DVB-C), Recommendation Engine, and targeted advertising.

Our solution is provisioned with Service Delivery Platform and Software Development Kits (SDKs) to allow the quick deployment of Value-Added Services and applications. Huawei’s solution can efficiently integrate with back office systems to provide a fast time to market for new services of IPTV, which enables carriers to create new revenue growth. The openness of our solution also facilitates the integration of different terminals such as set-top box and wireless devices.

Our solution also provides the custom design of Electronic Programming Guides (EPG) and User Interfaces (UIs) to fit with market needs. EPG customisation can be done expeditiously, on browser-based technology. The customisation of Value-Added services takes just one month for completion.

Huawei’s solution helps operators to reduce CapEx: it provides smooth system integration by making efficient use of existing components in a legacy environment with our modular components.

Fast time to market and a successful business launch can be achieved with our business consultancy services developing strategic plans, such as content strategy, marketing strategy and distribution strategy, leading to a well-defined business plan and roadmap. Our content services also provide customers the capability to deliver an IPTV service with attractive content, good QoS and high quality user experience.

Huawei’s IPTV system supports both centralised and distributed architectures to meet operator’s different scale requirements for IPTV service deployment. Huawei has a carrier-class, high-performance ATAE-based hardware platform for media services with switching backplane, that supports up to 24 Gbps. Huawei’s Media Delivery Network (MDN) is a universal content delivery system that can be used in both IP and HFC networks.

What changes do you believe are ahead for the broadband industry as a whole?

There are number of changes ahead for the broadband industry: the industry has experienced hitherto-unknown growth in the past 12 months, and there is no doubt that 2011 has been a boom year for broadband development.

It is interesting to note the variety of different players that have entered the market from different parts of the value chain, including broadcasters, consumer electronics manufacturers, and TV and games platform operators, as well as standalone VOD providers etc.

Fierce competition has been witnessed not only among telco IPTV providers but also between other players like Google TV, Apple TV, Yahoo Connected TV etc.

With the development of tablet and smart phones, the battle for main screen has already been started. Each of these players is battling to become the ‘homepage’ on the television for consumers’ access to content and services.

In the IPTV set-top box side, we have seen the emergence of hybrid set-top boxes that support satellite and cable transmission in order to grab mass market. Social TV is another trend introduced in past 12 months – the ability to support social media websites like Facebook and Twitter on the TV screen.

In short, development from open IPTV platform to Android-based STBs, from multi-screen trends to consumer behaviour, from traditional multicast TV to OTT and from content to new business models, have all been introduced in the past 12 months. All these factors are ready to change the landscape of the broadband industry.

What do you see as being the biggest single challenge to the broadband industry in the next few years, and why?

There are numerous challenges to face broadband industry in the next few years. For example in APAC region, a lack of network infrastructure, low broadband penetration rate, poor network condition and unavailability of the latest enabling technology have been some of the biggest issues which were faced by this specific region.

With the advancement of technology and deployment of Fibre-to-the-x (FTTx) networks, the situation is in the favour of broadband technologies, and especially IPTV network deployment.

How do you think the industry should start preparing to meet this challenge?

Operators, service providers and government should adopt FTTx and other new broadband-enabling technologies as soon as possible in order to meet this challenge.

How does being named in the awards shortlist benefit your business?

Winning this category is a rewarding experience for Huawei. This award is advantageous for our business, and provides great publicity and recognition for Huawei’s IPTV solution.

This enables the industry to benchmark Huawei against our competitors, and may well drive customers to our door as a result. Awards are held in high esteem by both the corporate and consumer industries because people are aware of the stiff competition they attract, and the efforts involved in entering them in the first place.

This year’s Broadband InfoVision Awards were announced during a gala dinner held aboard a river cruise in Paris on September 27th, 2011. For a complete list of winners, please click here