Gudjon’s Blog

For the past few years, it has been a bit of a cumbersome process for new service providers to establish IPTV services - especially in terms of getting started with the basic setup.

For service providers, it has been a bit of a jungle out there in terms of puzzling together the right system. Many companies use a lot of their highly valuable technical resources to plan and pick the right platforms, starting with scalable hardware, OS operational environment, application servers and database platforms, and then to select the right IPTV service delivery software platform and a suitable DRM. Either before or after this part of the process, the most suitable set-top boxes are selected, that have all the right configurations and drivers pre-integrated to fit the selected operational environment.

This process is complex and requires deep understanding and experience. This also means that the process becomes quite costly for the service providers, even before the purchase orders are issued.

Just recently we announced our strategy on how Industria plans to help our industry change this, by removing the barriers to entry for newcomers to establish their own innovative IPTV services. Our strategy and solution is called Zignal Cloud and is based on years of experience in our field.

During the years we have learned a lot, from both our mistakes and successes, regarding how to build and integrate these platforms. With the Zignal Cloud service, new innovators and first movers can establish IPTV services for their customer base with almost no upfront investment.

Zignal Cloud is an IPTV service delivery platform, hosted and operated by our experts. This means that we take care of the technical management of the software running on the customer premises, like IPTV set-top boxes, and the server infrastructure. The service provider then focuses on deploying and managing content streams, like IPTV multicast broadcast and unicast video on demand library. The service provider then logs into the Zignal Cloud administration portal to adjust and manage the assets on the electronic programming guide or on demand video catalogue.

This means that the service providers can start an IPTV pilot deployment in a matter of hours, not months.

As the service providers will just focus their own technical deployment on content streaming, we have seen a lot of positive developments from the different industry players. This includes the open source community, newcomers in peer-to-peer and the established carrier grade streaming platform providers. We support and embrace all these industry players. This means there are more opportunities now to both lower cost and get up and running faster on the streaming front.

Industria has a customer wiki site that customers of ours get access to when they sign-up for Zignal Cloud, where we have technical resources and documentation on how to get started on the streaming front. This includes examples on how to configure open source streaming solutions for both unicast and multicast streams.

Zignal Cloud has a very simple pricing scheme. Service providers can get started on our free service, that offers all the functionality and richness of the Zignal IPTV platform, for up to 15 set-top boxes. After the first 15 devices, a nominal monthly fee is charged for each active device.

Consequently, service providers can get started with no upfront investment, which should give us a spanking new set of service innovators - everything from innovative garage companies to the established corporate players that are nevertheless budget conscious.

I welcome you all to sign-up, as it is a completely free service for those who would like to get familiar with the platform.

I look forward for hearing from you and discuss this further!