According to In-Stat, the Asia Pacific IPTV market is expected to reach 39 million subscribers and the total IPTV revenue in the region is set to reach 8.1 billion by 2011. What do you think is fuelling the growth of IPTV in this region?
Richard McBee(RB): Network operators have invested billions of dollars over the past few years moving towards triple-play networks. For many operators, IPTV represents the last leg of triple play that together with voice and data services, will enable network operators to increase revenue and profitability. In addition, today’s highly competitive communications market is forcing network operators to move from a “one-size-fits-all” model for services and applications to a model that brings “one-to-one” personalized services to the consumer. IPTV, with its Video on Demand services (VoD), fits this new model of bringing personalized services to market.
Currently IPTV is taking off in Hong Kong, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore. What are the obstacles countries such as India, Indonesia, Australia and the Philippines face that IPTV is not being adopted as successfully there?
RB: In working with network operators worldwide, we have seen a number of factors that have impacted the adoption of IPTV. From an infrastructure perspective, many operators are still in the process of migrating their voice and data networks to IP. From a market readiness perspective, some markets are not ready for IPTV and the advanced multimedia applications that come along with it – a situation that could quickly change as competition within the local market changes. Another key point is that many network operators have not yet developed the necessary relationships with content providers as part of the IPTV ecosystem. For many operators, it’s always been about transport – but now they have to also think about the content as well.
IPTV is still an emerging service and in the Asian market where pirated DVDs and illegal P2P content downloads are hugely popular, is there real customer demand for next-generation TV service via broadband or is it all just vendor hype designed to sell more gear?
RB: IPTV is not just about offering another means of video delivery. Instead, it marks the beginning of delivering interactive, multimedia services that are truly personalized and add value to the end-user.
What are the challenges service providers face today with IPTV deployment?
RB: While IPTV offers a new revenue stream for carriers, it also presents some significant challenges - the biggest challenge is meeting customer quality expectations. While VoIP services present similar concerns, customers are somewhat tolerant of minor quality issues because they have been conditioned to accept issues with their mobile phone services. However, consumers expect an experience equal to or better than their current TV experience. Anything less will be unacceptable since it could lead to rejection of the services and increase customer churn.
In order for network operators to be successful in the deployment of multicast and eventually Video on Demand, they must change how they perceive and measure quality. Their mindset must not only focus on the network’s Quality of Service (QoS), but also the customer’s Quality of Experience (QoE).
For a network operator, ensuring QoE is no simple target. It begins with the proper testing and deployment of IPTV network elements, but extends network wide. Transporting digitized, encoded, video content packets is quite complex and errors are likely at network transitions during transport. Proactive, network-wide monitoring in real time is necessary. Network operators must have the ability to isolate and fix problems proactively before a customer calls to complain.
Could you tell us more about Tektronix’ latest GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution?
RB: The GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution for IPTV is the highest capacity, network-wide probing platform available for converged networks. The target customers for the GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution are network operators that are deploying Video over IP or IPTV within a converged, multimedia environment.
Delivered on a highly scalable monitoring platform across an entire network, the GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution quantifies the quality of transport services within IPTV and video over IP networks by providing 24/7 monitoring of all IP video traffic. The solution detects IP video issues and enables operators to respond to them before they become critical or impact subscribers. Once issues are detected, GeoProbe provides the tools to isolate the problem location and cause. Upon resolution, problem locations can be monitored in real-time to track the repair effectiveness and provide immediate feedback on the current state of the video transport quality.
The proactive network-wide problem detection capabilities, combined with powerful video analysis tools, produce such savings as reduced inbound customer service calls and reduced troubleshooting time for customer care and network operations departments.
How does GeoProbe benefit both the consumers and the service providers?
RB: The GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution is an historical performance monitoring solution, giving operators the ability to view the performance of the end-to-end network with high-level dashboards. It can generate reports and graphs to view data in multiple dimensions; track network metrics over time to discover trends or uncover periodic quality issues; utilize network trending to drive capacity planning; andaggregate days/months of network performance data.
As a result, service providers have the ability to diagnose quality and service metrics in real time, alerting them to potential customer-impacting service issues before they occur. Having a high quality of experience is key to having satisfied customers.
For consumers, they will be assured a successful video user experience.
Could you briefly take us through the technology behind the GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution?
RB: As network operators around the world begin to deploy video over IP and IPTV, the GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution enables them to verify the quality of content and transport - two key parameters that have a direct impact on customer retention and the overall customer experience.
For example, in IPTV systems, broadcast channel changes are performed using IGMP-oriented signaling. While very efficient, this method results in indeterminate delivery times. The GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution has the ability to measure the amount of time from when content is requested to when it is delivered. This is accomplished by coordinating signaling protocols with the requested media in order to measure the response time. In the case of Video on Demand (VoD), RTSP is often used to select and control VoD streams. The GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution has the ability to track RTSP latency in order to ensure fast response times. Furthermore, the RTSP session can be tracked as the content moves from element to element, so that if a problem should arise, network operation and engineering teams have the ability to quickly isolate and resolve the problem.
Verifying the quality of content in IPTV systems also presents some unique challenges. As the amount of video content increases, random sampling of streams by operators is no longer viable. Constant testing of content -- both in terms of presence and accuracy -- is required in order to deliver consistently superior performance. The highly scalabel GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution (which can scale large to small or small to large) has the ability to verify the content at key points within the transport network.
Ensuring quality of transport within an IP network is another challenge that is overcome with the GeoProbe Video Monitoring solution. With both broadcast and interactive modes, IPTV is most sensitive to delay, packet loss and jitter. Error correction mechanisms, required for reliable delivery of content across an IP infrastructure, also require continuous monitoring in order to verify that uncorrected error scenarios are detected before customers are impacted. Detecting and correcting network-related performance deterioration is critical to preserve and improve customer satisfaction.
GeoProbe is part of Tektronix’ Unified Assurance suite of applications. Could you tell us more about this suite?
RB: Tektronix' industry-leading Unified Assurance (UA) network management suite provides integrated, end-to-end performance monitoring solutions for customer, service and network assurance. UA supports a full range of monitoring capabilities across next generation mobile and IP networks, including active test solutions that provide active troubleshooting, provisioning and automated service quality monitoring.The Tektronix solutions quickly identify, localize and quantify service and network issues, giving customers an integrated, end-to-end next generation network.
The GeoProbe product enables network assurance capabilities for network engineers, providing the information needed to solve network and service problems across technologies, applications and element vendors. GeoProbe works with the APM (Advance Performance Management) product to enable engineers to manage network services by associating network events into functional groups for more focused and effective troubleshooting.
Could you comment on the recent announcement that Danaher is acquiring Tektronix for 2.85 billion? What does this mean for Tektronix’s future?
RB: The completed acquisition has created a new two-company structure. Tektronix (the former Instruments Business unit) and Tektronix’ Communications Business unit are now independent operating companies and have joined the Danaher Test and Measurement Platform. The Communications Business unit is now known as Tektronix Communications. This two-company structure is similar to that of Fluke and Fluke Networks, which are also independent operating companies under the Danaher Test and Measurement Platform.
By joining the Danaher family, Tektronix Communications will have additional resources and new tools to optimize our business and deliver even better products to our customers. Our brand will remain in tact, and our customers will see very little change as a result of the acquisition. Tektronix Communications’ mission remains the same: a focus on delivering test, measurement and monitoring solutions to network operators and equipment manufacturers on a worldwide basis.
What are Tektronix’s upcoming plans for Asia?
RB: Asia continues to be a very important market for Tektronix. The region has the fastest rate of wireless subscriber growth in the world and we are continuing to see growth in emerging technologies like WiMAX, LTE and IMS. The Asian market is very complex, but also has the ability to rapidly deploy new technologies partly because there are fewer legacy networks in place.
Our approach has been to make significant investments in the region and we expect to continue to do so in the future. We believe that to be successful in the market, which is really made up of many unique markets country by country, you must develop products and strategies specifically for the markets to support end customers’ buying habits and expectations. We work very closely with our customers in Asia, from the labs all the way through full network deployment, to provide test and monitoring solutions that make the complexity seamless to the customer. |
