Tandberg TV: 'Stand by for 1080p'

chris

Eric Cooney is Tandberg TV’s CEO, and he predicts that as well as an explosion in IPTV take-up, viewers will soon be enjoying “true” HDTV transmitted in 1080p.

His logic is that satellite operators, faced with increasing HD competition from cable and IPTV suppliers will resort to their unique advantage of plentiful bandwidth – and will start implementing 1080p/60Hz transmission within the next three years or so.

Cooney was speaking ahead of this week’s giant NAB show in Las Vegas. “Today’s broadcasters have concentrated on 1080i or 720p and this will change. The Holy Grail is to shift to 1080p at 50/60 Hertz. Our current partners are asking us for this additional functionality in order to deliver a superb customer experience and operational advantage. Operators are asking us these questions today, and this keeps our R&D technicians busy. I see this happening in the next three years, without doubt. The consumer electronics people are ready. TV displays, projectors, they are increasingly 1080p full high-definition. My guess is that it will be satellite that first offers these high-end services. It isn’t difficult to see the reasons why. Satellite, helped by further compression, could deliver these services as a distinct competitive advantage over cable and IP.”

Tandberg itself is on a roll, with Cooney claiming that all the “arrows are up and in the right direction” as far as 2008 is concerned. Eighteen months ago it was a little different, with the firm obliged to issue a profits warning (Q3/2006) not helped by slower than anticipated take-up of its products for the IPTV sector.

tandberg.jpg Then came Ericsson’s purchase of Tandberg a year ago. Cooney says the firm will keep the Tandberg TV brand as long as it makes sense to keep it. “Ericsson believes there’s a lot of equity in the Tandberg name, mainly because there’s a very large slice of business that Tandberg is in to, not least broadcast, cable and satellite. Ericsson is very strong in IPTV, and we can both help one another in that space, but there’s a huge amount of Tandberg business that’s outside of Ericsson. They acquired us for the value we offered, and that includes our brand. I would expect the Tandberg brand to continue for a significant time, while operating very much under the Ericsson banner. Candidly, it is my job at least in part, to make our other non-telco customers happy and comfortable with the Ericsson name, and that Ericsson loves you just the way we love you!”

As far as IPTV is concerned, Cooney says huge progress is being made. “We were comparing 2007 with 2008 to date and there’s a huge improvement year over year in the IPTV space. Tandberg’s profit warning was issued during Q3/2006, almost 18 months ago and this was a result of the slow-down in IPTV-related business. What’s changed? The technology has matured: chip-sets are available; the MPEG4 technology is robust and working well; HDTV picture quality is good. So, with improving maturity, as well as systems installed and working we are also beginning to see scale to such a case where there are platforms around the planet with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Fastweb, Verizon, AT&T, PCCW are all proving the technology. The final dynamic is the competitive one.”

“Operators two years ago were asking us ‘can you make TV work? And show me DSL pictures’,” adds Cooney. “Today it is much more about delivering not just the same as the local TV platform but a better all-around service. Out of the gate they want HDTV. Out of the gate they want a pretty sophisticated VOD service. They are talking to us and Ericsson about how we see the future, how we see truly converged services. It might be how they are going to move content about from the home to mobile devices. AT&T is already demonstrating its thought on this technology. They consider that location identification is very useful, allowing parents to go to the TV screen and know where their youngsters are because there’s a chip device that reports their location back to home. For us as technology suppliers what’s important is having open standards that everyone recognises and can work within.”

Some segments of the industry are calling for those open standards to percolate right down to set-top box level. To a certain extent this is already planned for but some industry voices want commonality to extend further so that consumers can buy an open-standard set-top box the way they would buy a TV set or a mobile phone, and know that it worked on their system at home. “We at Tandberg can see the sense in this, although we also have to plan for a future where the device at home might be collecting services from a variety of operators,” says Cooney. “Take VoD as an example: it’s perfectly possible for the future to see two or more suppliers of VoD, especially when wireless services are active. Take Facebook, or MySpace. These services simply didn’t exist two years ago, and we have to allow for this sort of flexibility.”

Questioned on how well the engineers were progressing MPEG4’s complex algorithms, Cooney explains that it took ten years of work to refine and deliver MPEG2’s better picture quality at lower bit rates. “The same is happening with MPEG4 except at a faster rate. We are at the very earliest stages of the MPEG4 toolset. When we first launched MPEG4 in HD, we were recommending 12 to 14 Mb/s, then 10, then eight and now we are having regular discussions about 6 Mb/s services. Clearly sport remains more hungry for bandwidth while other programming is more forgiving. So discussions continue, work continues on the algorithms and the toolset generally, but can I stress it is early days yet.”

“As for Japan’s ultra-HD TV I am a huge enthusiast, but I think it’s going to take time. We have first to see MPEG4 mature, probably into 1080p/50 as a mass market operation before we are ready to move to the next level. However, at Tandberg we’d love to see it happen. I’d love to upgrade everyone, starting tomorrow!”



source: Rapid TV News