A consulting client asked me back in 2005 if they could make a dent in the IPTV market by integrating commodity PCs and WiFi routers in the living room - I liked the idea but I told them they didn't have the financing to pull it off. They were right in market direction - it is going to be a hot summer for IPTV.
A recent news item describes how the battle to win IPTV deals in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) with smaller service providers is getting red hot as IBM and Cisco have joined forces to challenge the region's incumbents, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks .
IBM sees a 1BN Euro market for IPTV to Tier 2 and Tier 3 operators and has pulled together a soup-to-nuts package of technology, support, security, integration and financing with Cisco as the main sub-contractor.
Cisco also sees a huge opportunity in video. No wonder since - last year they paid $6.9 billion to acquire cable set-top box maker Scientific-Atlanta Inc. Sales at Scientific-Atlanta increased 85 percent to $752 million in 2006 versus 10-15 percent growth in Cisco core business. It's video, video and more video,'' said Kevin Landis, chief investment officer of San Jose-based Firsthand Capital Management, which oversees $750 million including Cisco shares.
Cisco will be providing IBM with their Content Delivery System for video on demand; edge security products; and Linksys home gateways.
However - what intrigues me is how IBM plans to do the risk assessment and ensure the security such as a complex system - designed and integrated by IBM with so many sub-contractors and vendors. Who will do the threat analysis and choose the most effective countermeasures to mitigate the risk of customer data theft and the threat to system availability with so many interfaces and so much system integration? IBM was not available with an answer to that question when I asked an IGS manager.
Perhaps the answer is not the mushroom theory of management but KISS (keep it simple stupid).
A colleague of mine is working on an extremely interesting IPTV project in a third-world country that basically takes the attitude that the settop box in the living room is really a computer running Linux and the upstream content distribution are commodity Intel servers running Linux.
This is potentially a much simpler and secure architecture and much cheaper than gluing together a bunch of systems.
Read more here about how Your TV, Internet and PC meet in the living room
