Rising oil prices, recession, the mortgage crisis, the credit crunch, inflation, falling stock markets, lower tax collections, any business or industry in today’s globalized world really can’t avoid being part of it all. Take for instance the banking system. A healthy banking system is a crucial part of our economy’s infrastructure. It’s a kind of like the first layers in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but seen from the enterprise perspective.

While there are certainly major downsides to the current economic situation, it can have some positive angles to it. Let’s face it. People were becoming a bit too satisfied– even lazy, taking more the easy way, like focusing primarily on short-term financial returns through acquisitions and leveraged buy-outs rather than spending on true innovation and core product development. With all that cash floating around, it was easy to just go with the flow, take the easiest route and think short-term.

Now that the credit crunch has hit, people have once again started thinking about getting the most bang for their buck, about the need to think of long-term profitability and bring into play a true yin and yang of discipline and imagination.

Crisis — As the Mother of Innovation

That is why I say the credit crunch can be good for innovation. Let’s look at a few examples:

• Instead of rushing out onto the job market to make a quick buck, more and more young people are deciding to stay in school to educate themselves further while riding out the economic downturn. We will no doubt see an increase in the number of research projects bringing us new ideas for business development.
• The growth of the banking sector has undeniably caused somewhat of a brain drain. In the current banking crisis, the best and the brightest will no longer automatically follow the easy money to a job in banking, but will be open to exciting possibilities in other industries, thus giving innovative companies increased access to talent.
• During an economic boom, many companies and consumers will chose the most obvious option, without regard for cost or long-term viability. It is easiest to go with something you know, so when money isn’t a big consideration, lesser known, but highly innovative solutions may not get as much attention. Once money becomes tight, businesses and consumers become more cost conscious and focused on long-term benefits. This fuels innovation, idea development and a focus on fulfilling customer needs as efficiently as possible.

For Industria and its subsidiaries, therefore, the current credit crunch offers a multitude of possibilities and opportunities. Our sharp focus on providing the most innovative and user-friendly TV media software available, as well as the full array of cutting edge Digital Living services for the 21st century lifestyle, puts us in a great position to use the current economic situation to strengthen and grow our company.

Take for example Zignal Cloud, a truly disruptive technology innovation offering for our industry. In the current economic climate, I have no doubt that Zignal Cloud will become even more attractive than it already was. With the Cloud service we can transform the market for IPTV solutions by significantly lowering barriers to entry for newcomers and existing players that need upgrading of their infrastructure. Zignal Cloud really simplifies the process of offering commercial TV over broadband by offering a highly scalable infrastructure in a hosted environment.

One of the most important aspects of Zignal Cloud is the pay-as-you-grow model, so start up cost is close to zero. Until now, service providers needed to spend millions and most of the time would select the big blue chip vendors as they have strong local presence and project a well known brand that is recognized by the company’s investors and board members. However, priorities and thinking do change as budgets get cut and companies don’t have the luxury of spending big sums with the big brands just to get a fraction of what the true industry innovators have to offer!

Zignal Cloud is all about lowering the total cost of ownership and CapEx is more or less eliminated, at the same time as the service providers can reduce technology risks and decreases time to market. Now that is what innovation is all about!

Industria is innovating in other areas as well. Zignal is continuously being upgraded to ensure that we provide the most advanced user-experience available. No one comes close to Zignal in terms of usability, speed, compatability and ease. Industria and affiliated companies are also developing new and exciting projects, which you will hear more about at the appropriate time. – I can’t say any more at this stage, but I promise exciting times ahead.

Finally, let me say that in today’s economy, entrepreneurial thinking is especially important for our society. Innovative companies play a crucial role in getting us out of the current malaise. The way to forge ahead and spur the economy back into high growth is value creation through innovation.

Knowledge management, corporate culture and all forms of increased productivity have interested me greatly for years. I think these themes are some of my core driving forces when it comes to my interest in executing new ideas with talented people.

Industria is a knowledge-based company that builds its value on the competence of the company’s talent. Therefore, knowledge is one of the company’s primary assets.

There is quite a lot of information floating around the office environment that can be called information items. These can be anything from a discussion in the canteen, to email communications, discussions at meetings and so forth. But these information items only have short-term value for both you as an individual and the company.

A key goal for each employee at Industria is to transform these numerous knowledge items into knowledge assets. A knowledge asset is something that has a long-term value for all employees and the company as a whole. The reason for its increased value is because it has been stored in the ‘corporate memory‘ and therefore has changed from being just an information item into a knowledge asset.

Corporate memory

Industria is using a Wiki system as its corporate memory. This means that all knowledge assets are being stored as wiki pages. These can be anything from meeting minutes, whitepapers, solution documentation, policy or other forms of knowledge. Wiki pages are simple to create and very easy to manage. Wiki pages are very accessible and easily searchable. This simplicity and usability of the Wiki are very important and really make the difference in turning information items into knowledge assets.

Recollecting our thoughts

As time goes by and Industria’s memory expands, it becomes increasingly important to be able to recollect our thoughts quickly. Searching for documents on the wiki is just as easy as using Google, since you can search for specific types of information within a specified time range or only for information that has been tagged specifically. Furthermore, the wiki search engine also searches within PowerPoint, PDF and Word attachments.

Why are knowledge assets important?

Knowledge assets are important for Industria because we need to know what has worked well and what has not, in order to be able to learn from our experience. How we do things today and tomorrow needs to be reflected by our experience. We know that companies tend to make the same mistakes over and over again; maybe the reason is that companies have not been able to remember what they did wrong when relying on short term memory (information items).

Benefits of using Wiki as the Corporate Memory

• Improved Accessibility: Single-user “desktop” tools like Microsoft Word are not recommended for writing up documents like meeting minutes, policy documents, solution documentation, technology analysis or whitepapers. The reason is that in most cases we are writing documents we want to share with our colleagues and for this purpose using our wiki, creating knowledge assets, is the way to go. However there are always some documents we write only for our selves, e.g. memos or action items, but we need to think if others would benefit from being able to access the information and, if so, to use the Wiki. By standardizing, i.e. creating simple wiki pages rather than writing up Microsoft Word documents, the accessibility to the content has been improved. There is a saying in the world of usability design that with every extra mouse click the user need to make you loose half of your audience. This is the same for information management.

• Reduced Complexity with More Effective Organization: The primary rule of good information management is to never duplicate data, rather use a single centralized stored version of the data. If and when the data needs to be shared with colleagues, a link pointing to the data can be sent on email or by other communication means - not a copy of that data in a form of attachment on email. (We don’t want to build a mental illness like schizophrenia in our corporate memory!)

• Reduced Use of Email: A very important reason for standardizing work by using a single wiki for storage, is to minimize the use of the email Inbox. Email can cause a lot of distraction and introduce chaos. When documents are sent as attachments on email, these documents are being duplicated in everyone’s email. By using wiki, your email Inbox will not be used as a document storage system and therefore it will lower dramatically the amount of daily emails in your inbox. When all members of the team exploit this methodology the benefit will be substantial and the amount of daily email in all our inbox will thankfully go down. This will make each of us more organized and we will gain more productive time out of a normal working day.

• Accurate Version Control: Another benefit is that it will be so much easier to look up the last updated version of the data, as it is only stored in a single instance centrally within the corporate memory. At the same time, Wiki provides seamless and powerful version control so that you can revert to any of the former versions at any time.

A concrete example

Imagine you send out project meeting minutes in a Word document as an attachment to 10 people on email. It is quite likely that only 5 will make the extra clicks to open up the attachment, as you have introduced one more complexity factor by concealing your data in an attachment. As you send it out on email that means it will have a low lifespan, as some messages simply get lost in all the email flood of unorganized teams. In addition, it will be very difficult for a new member of the team to come up to speed on the project, as the new member will not be able to access other members’ email inboxes to review previous project meeting minutes!

The right way to do this is to write up the meeting minutes as a wiki page, carefully located at the right place within the overall hierarchy in the wiki. After the page has been saved, you can send your colleagues a link to the page so they can visit it at a time convenient for them. Most often, they will not go there straight away as they just know it’s there and has been written. At the right time for them, the meeting minutes can be visited and read in addition to all the other relevant meeting minutes stored at the same location within the corporate memory. New team members can also be invited to join in and get updated on current and past meeting minutes.

Example summary

The meeting minutes summary has been added in the corporate memory and is now an asset for all stakeholders. Additionally, your colleague’s email inbox has been rescued from storing duplicated data.

The same applies for all information items, including company phone book, policies, project contacts, solution documentation, risk registry, proposals plus all the bits and pieces of project documents.

Wrapping up

Personally, I strive to build up knowledge and store information bits this way, equally for my personal and company related documentation.

As an example, my personal pictures are all securely stored at Flickr, my music library is backed-up using SugarSync, all my documents and notes are stored within my company’s wiki system and so on. My address book is synchronized using .Mac between my iPhone and my MacBook, while my email and calendar are stored and synchronized at Google Apps Premier. I can even leverage tools like Facebook for keeping in touch with my friends, as I never know where in the world I will be next week.

The network is the computer and this computer of mine has a mammoth secure storage. Meaning that if I loose my laptop, all my data will be just at the other end of the wire.

“Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?”

The next phenomenon will definitely be in connecting all this information and making it work for you. This will be achieved by means of Semantic Web technologies, although it will require us to describe our knowledge items in more detail so that our information system can “understand” them. This means that a true knowledge asset in the future will be described in a language understood by the Semantic Web.

Isn’t the future exciting? ;-)

When this blog is written, I am on my way flying to Iceland – my favorite island in the world - to visit my family and celebrate the official First Day of Summer. However, quite often it is snowing on this day!

I am also going over reports for approval, as our accountants have just finished the 2007 accounts. I am proud to update customers, partners and other stakeholder that are following the company’s development that 2007 was our fourth profitable year. Furthermore, the outlook is good, as already at this writing we have signed contracts for 2008 that already succeed total revenues of 2007. 

Our market is full of life and the whole marketplace is characterized by paradigm change, where the traditional telecoms and TV media companies are rapidly converging into a single, big communications and entertainment industry. I’m very excited about Industria being positioned right in the centre of this turmoil. And we definitely plan to play a role here, by providing the solutions and technology to facilitate the business models that are being called for in the battle for market share between the main players.

Being focused and true to a simple vision will get companies far. The Industria vision is simply to make the TV experience better for people, meaning we are focused on the actual consumer, his/her desires and wishes — not just technologies and systems as many of our competitors are.

Our primary basis for realizing this vision is our innovation in business models, unique view of the market and our intellectual property in the form of our Zignal product line. The rest is our ability to execute, so stay tuned to follow our activity on the execution front!

We also need to have simple beliefs and company motto. Ours is simply; Fun, Innovative and Profitable!

I’m afraid I need to stop blogging now, as all of a sudden the audio-book playing in my headset caught my full attention and I can’t write any more! … listening to The Starfish and the Spider. - A quote from the book; “The Internet doesn’t have a CEO!”, is very much in line with my own view of being in this position!

Most often when I draw up the Industria organizational chart on whiteboards, I use a chart that can look obscure for some old school managers. It is a chart that illustrates my CEO box at the bottom of the chart, along with other Chiefs.

The role of the C-level members is primarily to make sure the overall engine works.

This version of mine represents a 5 level approach to the organizational layers. Each level can stand for its own budget unit within the organization.

Level 1: The Customer

At the top of my organizational chart is the customer, as it is from here that revenues are driven. In some cases the customer can be an internal budgeted project.

Level 2: Sales

The first internal management box is the sales unit, driven by revenue generation and personal sales bonuses.

Level 3: Product Management and Professional Services

There is a lot of communication between level 2, 3 and 4. This is where customer expectations need to meet product features, deliveries and so forth.

Level 4: Engineering (implementation)

The goal is to make sure engineers focus on what they do the best, which is engineering. This means the only customers of engineering are the so called product owners from either product management or the professional services organization. Engineering follows the Scrum framework of Agile software development.

Level 5: The C-Level Cloud

The C-Level members of the organization are there to make sure the engine is operating at its full capacity, on all cylinders, with enough fuel and whatever is needed to gain the most efficiency. The team also facilitates and motivates all stakeholders from level 1-4.

We are constantly reconfiguring our organizational infrastructure with the primary goal of gaining more organizational agility. Full transparency of knowledge needs to be secured and it’s important that all members have full buy-in and understanding on each responsibility and what is to be expected from the ordinary workday.

As documented within our own internal wiki, the main responsibilities of the CEO are to help foster the company’s long-term vision (strategic) and to help implement the strategic goals and objectives of the organization. Furthermore, the CEO is to give direction and leadership toward the achievement of the organizational philosophy, mission, strategy, and annual goals and objective. Other responsibilities are on corporate development, facilitation and assistance.

This is bound to change now with

On the Zignal Apps Marketplace, we foresee various TV applications that could be beneficial for hotel deployments. I expect some apps to be developed by Industria but most by third party developers.

A solution for the hospitality market needs to include the following features:

• Good international TV channel line-up
• Up-to-date Video on Demand service
• Hotel information screens on the TV
• Integrated hotel services like display of restaurant menu, housekeeping, event booking and hotel surveys
• Flight schedule of nearest international airports
• Local weather information
• Messaging support, connecting the PMS system with on-screen TV messages
• On-screen display for incoming voice calls
• Targeted advertising based on customer profile
• Simple ways to monitor and support daily operations like reminders & voting on TV-shows/movies, EPG maintenance, STB monitoring, QoS and customer profile management
• HD screen support
• … just to name a few.

This is a great opportunity for systems integrators that are specializing in solutions for the hospitality market. With Zignal Cloud, anyone can use our XML-based API interfaces for anything from provisioning to billing management. It also means that custom hospitality TV applications can be created using our Zignal Application SDK.

Integrating to the property management software (PMS) is important, as this is the only interface the front desk staff uses. On customer check-in, the TV should have the customer name on the TV screen for greetings and a clean billing record on the video usage. As the customer rents movies, Zignal should add the price for it immediately to the customer bill in the PMS solution.

Already there is a jungle of PMS software solutions out there. I can name Galaxy, Fidelio Micros, Opera, Encore, Jaguar, just to name a few. Each of these PMS softwares has their own versions with its own flavour on how to integrate. For example, I have seen our professional services guys implementing a XML Web Service interface over 422 serial communications to the Fidelio Opera system. Not the most reliable integration around.

Integrators use the open XML interface of the Zignal Platform to connect it to the various types of PMS software. This means the PMS software at the front-desk controls the TV experience and feature set.

As Zignal offers great TV experience on HD screens, it opens up a good opportunity for hotels to upgrade now, moving to HD ready flat TV screens. It also offers better space saving on top of a much better TV experience. As the HD screens offer much higher resolution, these screens are also a viable choice for using TV Apps for services like Email or just browsing the web.

A few points on the deployment note:

• By using Zignal Cloud, there is no need to install complex software infrastructure at the hotel or hospital premises. This lowers both cost and complexity.
• The hotel just needs a basic Internet connection to access the Zignal Cloud. The Zignal Client in the set-top box is designed in a way that the load between the box and the Cloud network is minimum, basically only during the set-top box boot time, when the Zignal Client is being uploaded to the box. This means the hotel can just use a DSL connection for communicating with the Zignal Cloud.
• To lower the cost of on-site streaming equipment, hybrid set-top boxes can be used utilizing DVB-C, DVB-S or DVB-T transmissions. This means that no IP streaming equipment is needed for the TV channels.
• If hybrid boxes are used, the only IP streaming equipment used on-site is the video server for the On Demand video catalogue. VOD servers are always becoming more cost effective, in addition to some interesting open source initiatives.
• For pure IPTV boxes, streaming equipment is needed for trans-coding signals in either DVB-S, DVB-T or DVB-C to the IP network within the premises. There are various new low cost offerings available on the market that can be utilized for this.
• Hotels with the luxury of having fat IP pipe-using fibre can leverage hosting facilities in some markets for the IP streaming head end. This in turn reduces the complexity for hotels, which do not have to worry about maintaining the streaming equipments at the hotel as part of their daily operation.

Systems integrators and other specialists in the hospitality market should sign-up for the Cloud and get in touch with us to take this further.

Furthermore, software vendors of in-house created IPTV solutions for hotels should seriously consider using their funds on more value creation for their companies rather than inventing the wheel again by creating a base IPTV solution. Zignal can behave like a great toolbox or developer’s kit for software companies that need to implement custom solutions.

The opportunity here is to deploy Zignal in a mixed business environment, where a single service provider may serve different businesses. This opens up the opportunity to enable the virtual network operator business model for service providers. This also opens up the opportunity for service providers to service businesses like hotels, hospitals and gated communities, all with its own branding and its unique content availability.

This is partly what we are doing for our own deployment on Zignal Cloud. There we add further functionality, like security and authentication down to different hierarchical accounts and groups.

Since Industria is very true to its vision of enabling a genuine entertainment experience on devices such as televisions, we want to do what we can to solve the challenge with clumsy channel changing in a typical IPTV environment.

As previously posted, I am very happy with our blazing fast and intuitive user interface. It means that we are doing our part as well as we can. Nevertheless, IPTV’s current inability to change between channels in a timely fashion is in our mind one of the single biggest problem of our industry.

As we know, channel zapping is mostly outside of the scope of IPTV middleware solutions like Zignal, but there is a role we can play in terms of improving it. One solution we have been toying with and brainstorming about for the last three years at Industria is an idea of unicasting to the set-top box during the zapping-period, merging seamlessly with the multicast stream after a little while. (I have sometimes called this Intra Coded Frames on Demand service).

In this blog I discuss one potential way to solve and implement this. It’s a bit technical, as I rely massively on input from my fellow engineers.

The improvement is only possible on a network with a return channel, unicast delivery and a significant amount of spare bandwidth on the access line. It is not possible, for example, on traditional DVB-S, DVB-C and DVB-T networks. If implemented, this improvement gives IPTV service providers an advantage in service quality, compared to other IPTV service providers. The improvement can be applied equally well to MPEG-2 and H.264 streams.

I give credit to my fellow engineers (Boyan and Baldur) for helping conceptualize this. Now I hope that some other engineers or entrepreneurs out there can take this even further and get this implemented in the real world.

First, let’s outline three different perspectives on the scenario of this implementation;

1. The IPTV Set-top Box Perspective
2. The Network Perspective
3. The GOP Server Perspective

Below you see more detailed analysis of these three perspectives.

1.) IPTV Set-top Box Perspective (Zignal)

The IPTV set-top box scenario can be best explained in the following user scenarios steps:

• Step 1: User presses button on remote.
• Step 2: STB leaves previous channel and resets decoder. In a properly configured network this is a very fast operation taking not more than 10 ms. This should not be a blocking operation for the STB software, i.e. no waiting involved.
• Step 3: STB opens UDP socket.
• Step 4: STB software notifies GOP Server. Message includes multicast group and port.
• Step 5: STB joins multicast group (sends IGMPv2 membership report).
• Step 6: For a duration of a maximum of 500ms, traffic from both the GOP server and Multicast group arrives at the STB. This traffic is destined for the same UDP port. Traffic from the GOP server is unicast. Other traffic is multicast. The STB should be able to receive both types of traffic on a single socket. The STB should be able to deal with duplicate and out-of-order traffic. To do this in a reliable manner, RTP transport is preferred.

Notes to the above scenarios:

1. Notification as explained in step 3 is done through a UDP message and it is not a blocking procedure for the STB software. Even if UDP is not possible, a persistent TCP session would do the job as well, because the message would fit in a single MSS.
2. The STB wouldn’t bind to the multicast group, as it uses a local address on the UDP socket to receive the multicast traffic. It would bind to 0.0.0.0 (any local address). This means that the STB would be able to receive unicast and multicast traffic on the same socket. Even if the current implementation is not binding to a “any” address, this would be a minor change to the STB software.
3. An MPEG-TS layer or MPEG2 Video decoder must be able to deal with repeated and out-of order MPEG-TS 188 byte packets, through time stamp or sequence elimination. The easiest way to do this is to use RTP rather than plain UDP for sending data.

2.) Network Perspective

• Step 2: IGMP Leave. IGMP fast-leave kicks in. Multicast group left.
• Step 4: Single UDP message or TCP segment. Forwarded to GOP server.
• Step 5: IGMP membership report. Join PIM group. SPT switch-over. Deliver Multicast packets.
• Step 6: Traffic from multicast group flows through, together with traffic from GOP server. To avoid interface overload when zapping, traffic from GOP server should be treated as less-than-best-effort (LBE)

3.) GOP Server Perspective

The GOP Server keeps a copy of the current incomplete GOP in its memory. In a small setup, a GOP server would listen to a lot of multicast groups.

• Step 4: The GOP server receives a request.
• Step 6: The GOP server sends a shaped burst of UDP packets from the beginning of the GOP to current time plus a constant. To avoid interface queue overload when zapping, traffic from GOP server should be treated as a less-than-best-effort (LBE). Also traffic is shaped to a predefined bandwidth. For a 4Mbps stream, the size of the burst can be as big as 250KB.

Notes on the GOP Server:

• The server needs to cache all the relevant data of the current incomplete GOP. This is easily accomplished by parsing the transport stream and reading the MPEG sequence and GOP headers when they arrive. No further processing or decoding of the stream needs to be done on the server.
• There is no need of decryption and interaction with the CA/DRM system, as the encryption is actually scrambling, and it is done in the MPEG elementary streams; transport stream tables are clear text. The decryption will be resolved by the STB by itself. The only interaction needed is with the middleware. The middleware needs to send as fast as possible a request to the GOP cache server, and the server will flood the current GOP to the unicast IP address of the STB. That solution is simple and will work with most of the IPTV headends. Our major issue is the time needed from the pressing of the button of the remote to the receiving of the GOP. As the Zignal currently does not support OOB signalling or UDP messaging directly from the STB, that means TCP or “thru-Zignal Server” signalling have to be implemented. Because of the TCP architecture, we’ll have at least 2 RTT times between the STB and GOP server + 2* OS user-process - kernel jitter and delay (which is very low in Linux). This means that this will take something close to 2 * RTT (if it is 10ms - 20ms) to notify the GOP server. If the messaging is passed thru the Zignal server, the delay will be increased at least two times (if the Zignal server architecture does not introduces delay by itself). Notifications could also be transmitted by UDP from the set-top box to the GOP server, with the addition of a lightweight client on the box that interfaces with the middleware.
• The current incomplete GOP will be transmitted by unicast to the STB. There can be an issue with the buffer in the STB (imagine a situation where just the last frames have to be played, we send a full GOP, then comes the second GOP, the STB will have to receive both GOPs, or picture freezing will be introduced), but this can be addressed on the set top box, either by having a large enough buffer for two whole GOPs or by implementing a selective buffer purge. This is hard to address on the server side, because the network latency can vary. I believe that this solution can be easily developed and will shorten the channel change time significally.

Timeline | Assumptions

• Button-press to IGMP leave = 200 ms (rather slow STB reaction)
• IGMP leave = 10 ms
• Decoder reset is a blocking operation = 50 ms
• Decoder start-up once, the jitter buffer is full = 50 ms
• IGMP join = 10 ms
• Network delay = 10 ms
• Stream bandwidth = 4Mbps
• Stream is shaped. i.e. I frame takes much more time than other frames
• GOP server burst shape = 15Mbps
• GOP server guard time = 20ms
• Join time offset = average case (250ms after beginning of GOP transmission)
• Jitter buffer threshold in STB = 2Mb (250KB)

Timeline list | Without the improvement

1. 0ms - User presses remote button
2. 200ms (+200) - IGMP leave, decoder reset start
3. 210ms (+10) - last Multicast packet from previous stream arrives
4. 250ms (+50 from nr.3) - decoder reset end, Open UDP socket, IGMP join
5. 260ms (+10) - first multicast packet from new stream arrives
6. 510ms (+250) - GOP begins
7. 1010ms (+500) - jitter buffer threshold reached, decoder start
8. 1060ms (+50) - First picture displayed

Timeline list | With improvement

1. 0ms - User presses remote button
2. 200ms (+200) - IGMP leave, decoder reset start
3. 3. 210ms (+10) - last Multicast packet from previous stream arrives
4. 4. 250ms (+50 from nr.2) - decoder reset end, Open UDP socket, signal GOP server, IGMP join
5. 5. 260ms (+10) - first multicast packet from new stream arrives. Request arrives at GOP server, GOP burst begins at server
6. 6. 270ms (+20 from nr.4) - GOP burst begins (20ms roundtrip to GOP server). 3.08Mb (exactly 1 GOP + 250ms random access time + 20ms guard time) at 15Mbps = 206ms. 1 GOP will arrive in 134ms
7. 404ms (+134) - Jitter buffer threshold reached, decoder start
8. 454ms (+50 from nr.7) - First picture displayed
9. 476ms (+206 from nr.6) - GOP burst ends, 20ms overlap with multicast

Timeline Discussion

In the above example the proposed improvement reduces actual channel zapping time by 606ms. It is worth noting that if STB associated delays (reaction, decoder reset, decoder start) were zero, the picture would appear in only 154ms (20ms roundtrip + 134ms for first GOP and buffer threshold) from remote button press which is about 5 PAL frames. This is very close to an analogue TV experience.

A solution like this could be quite a natural extension for companies within the video server field. GOP Server functionality would be added as an additional service. The business case for service providers to add servers to enable a fast-channel zapping experience for its customers could easily be calculated and would have similarities to VOD network capability cost calculations. More and more servers can be added upon demand, based on what level of experience the service provider would like to enable for its subscribers.

I could also foresee a project like this being implemented as an open source cooperation project between Industria, several vendors and service providers, in terms of fixing one of our main challenges in enabling a true television experience over IP networks. Please get in touch with us if you are interested in this.

This fact is highly reflected in our technology and especially the new generation Zignal client technology that we just announced.

Our vision has always been aligned towards offering a true television experience. Our primary criteria concerning user-interface are speed and simplicity. The consumer is used to being entertained on the sofa, with only the remote control to deal with. If the user-interface is slow, then it does not represent a satisfactory television experience. - This we know.

The new generation of our Zignal platform has a completely rewritten user-interface technology, based on input and experience from previous versions, the industry and our own customer deployments.

Our previous version was fast, but the new one is about 8-10 times faster. - Not bad at all.

It is interesting that we now face new types of challenges, as we have solved the speed issue in rendering rich UI. The two challenges we face now are both outside of our scope or technology domain, but we need to work closely with industry vendors on solving them.

This is a) the IPTV channel zapping scenario and b) infrared communication speed between the set-top box and the remote control.

The IPTV Channel Zapping Scenario

I will blog a specific entry on this challenge, as I want to call for action on this matter. Solving this matter has been a pet project of mine for some time and I have worked out several scenarios with some of the Industria engineers on how this can be achieved closest to real-time. Watch this space for further updates…

IR Remote Control Speed Scenarios

It’s interesting, that when we demonstrate the speed of the Zignal interface, we need to hook up an external USB keyboard, because our user-interface and rendering technologies are actually faster than the infrared communication drivers can handle in the set-top boxes. This needs to be fixed by the set-top box manufactures, but we are making sure that our voice is heard by the vendors of both IR remote controls and set-top boxes.

We like to think about light app servers and flexible hardware as a positive solution for scaling. This thinking is more in line with how Google and Amazon are scaling their web platform. Also, you wake up one day to learn about successful platforms like Facebook, that are built on PHP and MySQL and serving more users than anyone could have ever dreamed of a few years back.

If I quote the Industria CTO on whether Zignal scales, his answer is simply, “yes, it scales to smithereens”! Furthermore, I can touch upon 4 key points on this as a good starter;

1. We have lots of logic running on the actual end-user device, including data caches. This means that the client does not need to make too many requests on the server. In particular, EPG data is delivered in a compact form and up to two weeks worth of EPG data is cached by the client. The client then does not need to re-fetch the same data to be displayed again or in a different form.
2. We have engineered the server using powerful OS Java tools like Spring and Hibernate that have been used for many large scale web- and transaction systems. By utilizing these tools we can scale the server to handle tens, even hundreds of thousands of users on single, powerful server hardware.
3. The Zignal database structure is engineered to handle most data in local caches on the Zignal Server. These means we can scale horizontally on many servers without adding much load on the database or the database cluster.
4. We are beginning to use the Terracotta clustering solution to distribute higher-level structures, rather than merely caching database records. This should lead both to higher throughput per Zignal Server in the cluster, and less load on the database per Zignal Server.

Yes, Zignal can scale for the millions of users and what we have now is a great start!

The Zignal Applications Marketplace

Following the introduction of our (Software as a Service) Zignal Cloud platform, we now offer a strong partnership framework for vendors and software application developers in the IPTV space.

This is a platform where vendors of IPTV solutions can be pre-integrated with the Zignal Cloud API, with the primary goal to make it easier for new service providers to launch their IPTV services.

The partnership framework outlines the areas on which the companies join forces. These areas are;

• Pre-integration of technologies
• Value added sales arrangements
• Joint promotional efforts
   

Zignal Cloud

Zignal Cloud is the server infrastructure for TV set-top boxes, PC, media centers and mobile devices. The consumer can experience rich media service on a Zignal-enabled device, as TV set-top boxes or their media enabled mobile handsets. Services include Video on Demand, Pause live TV and Personal Video Recording, to name a few. The Zignal client is entirely built on open standards and there is nothing in the client codebase that is proprietary, making it the de-facto solution to work with.

The Zignal Cloud offering is based on the Software-as-a-Service model. This means that Industria hosts a carrier-grade IPTV Service Delivery Platform in close cooperation with our infrastructure partners.

Zignal Cloud can be accessible through a host of APIs, where service providers are able to fully customize and integrate Zignal with their own software stack. Local media assets are managed within the back office environment of Zignal Cloud, including both IP video streams and On-Demand video assets.

As leading vendors of solutions can be pre-integrated with Zignal Cloud, the benefit for service providers is a far lower barrier to entry to get started with innovative IPTV services.

There is no start-up or initiation fee to establish a new account and the first 15 device licenses are free of charge. This means that service providers of any size are able to get started with IPTV services with minimum startup investment. Furthermore, developers can join in for no cost and implement Zignal Extensions and Zignal Applications or leverage the Zignal API with no cost associated and publish their own application offerings to the Zignal Applications Marketplace.

Benefits of the Zignal Applications Marketplace

The IPTV market is far too fragmented today, with inconsistency among deployed IPTV systems. However, applications published to the Zignal Applications Marketplace become available to all service providers using Zignal.

This means that application developers only integrate and deploy once and gain the benefit for each Zignal-based service provider.

Some vendors’ applications will require specific hardware to be installed at the service provider premises, like for streaming or ad-inserts. In these cases, the process to order this equipment has been dramatically simplified. Service providers can also learn what equipment is the most popular and gets the best ratings from the community.

Creating Zignal Applications for the Zignal Apps Marketplace

Zignal Applications and Extensions are created using the Zignal Application SDK and may have booth server and/or client side components. Industria offers this SDK for free, including an example application.

These applications can then be dynamically deployed, using flexible deployment rules on the Zignal platform, without rebooting the device client.

In addition to the Apps and Extension SDK, Zignal offers a powerful set of server side API functions. This API can be used to extend and fully integrate with server providers’ own software solutions, like provisioning and other backoffice systems. These API functions are:

• Provisioning API
• Billing API
• Account Manager API
• Entitlement API
• Schedule Manager API
• Session Manager API
• Asset Manager API
• Delivery Manager API
• Reminder API
   

I hope this gives a good insight into the potential of the Zignal Applications Marketplace and the extendability and openness of the platform.

According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is defined as “a trend in World Wide Web technology, and web design, a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing among users. The term became notable after the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.^[2][3] Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use webs.”

With the introduction of Zignal Cloud as fully W3C standard compliant and now being architected as hosted services, fully extendible with rich API, we are seeing the birth of what we can call a TV 2.0 service.

You sign up for the service just like when you create your Salesforce.com, Facebook, Google Apps or Flickr account. If you have technical resources at hand, you can further extend it and integrate with your own software, equally on the client- and server-side.

Zignal Cloud comes with a library of extensions, like an Electronic Programming Guide Extension, Video on Demand Extension, Personal Video Recorder Extension and more. As we do not want to limit our platform with just our own creativity, we empower the development community to participate and contribute to our development. The primary purpose of the Zignal Extensions is to offer a rich user-interface feature for the end-user.

Additionally, the platform offers a server side API for integration of existing solutions, like provisioning, asset scheduling or billing. The Zignal Cloud API functions do include Provisioning API, Billing API , Schedule Manager API , Session Manager API , Asset Manager API and Reminder API, to name a few.

The interesting part is that you can sign-up and use the platform fully free of charge. Its not until your deployment has volume that subscription payments kick in. This means that entrepreneurs, innovators and developers can start using the platform to develop their own offerings and solutions at no licensing cost for Zignal.

To demonstrate the flexibility and integration power of Zignal, you can see examples of the extensions that do come with platform:

Zignal Video on Demand Extension

Today its not only about the Hollywood blockbuster catalogue of on demand videos, but also community- and user generated content. This means we will see more customizable Video Catalogue Extensions that will even integrate with services like YouTube, MySpace Videos or the locally hosted video library of downloaded DivX, AVI, MP4 and Quicktime movies.

Advanced Trick Player Extension

We have seen a very encouraging development in technologies that offer video on demand. To be able to fully support the latest features and technologies, our Trick Player Extension can be further enhanced to utilize the capabilities of the deployed on demand technologies.

Personal Video Recording Extension

We can foresee various scenarios of utilization of personal video recordings. In some cases service providers would like to deploy networked-PVR services and in other scenarios the existing PC at home would be utilized to be the actual hard-drive recording device. By customizing the PVR Extension, alternative business models can be implemented and offered to the subscriber base.

Photo Album Extension

You would perhaps like to implement a photo album that integrates with your own photo service or public services like Flickr or Picasa.

Electronic Programming Guide Extension

We will surely see a strong development of new technologies and features integrated right within the EPG, to support more advanced interactivity and advertisements. The Zignal EPG Extension can be further extended and enhanced by developers to create additional functionality to suite the different business model needs.

This was my quick overview of why I feel that our next generation Zignal platform can truly become the foundation for the new TV 2.0. At this writing, our Zignal Cloud is in an invitation only beta program. Nevertheless, you can sign up for the program and get evaluated for early bird participation.

Send me your thoughts on email, join me at Linkedin, Twitter or Facebook or just comment on this blog. I look forward for hearing from you.

I am very happy to see that our Zignal IPTV service delivery software has now the largest pure IPTV user base in the UK, beating the use of Microsoft Mediaroom solution. Not bad at all.

This has become a reality because of our customer Inuk Networks and our good friends there, with their Freewire TV service. See some news on their latest customer numbers here.

Inuk has integrated Zignal with its BSS systems for customer provisioning and billing, using the standard Zignal API. Furthermore, the Zignal client has been optimized to run on a PC & Mac with support for CAS/DRM like Widevine. Inuk also uses Zignal Manager (a remote web administration tool), to support daily operation and maintenance of its IPTV deployment.

We at Industria would like to congratulate the pioneering management and technical team at Inuk for their success in executing their business plan. Inuk is a type of agile organization that I have a good deal of respect for. The company has been focused on its go-to-market strategy with a pure IP-play vision. It will surely be interesting to follow the company’s development this year.

One of the differentiation factor of Freewire and how our Zignal solution was deployed, compared to the competition, is that the platform runs on Windows and Mac OS X. This means that the consumers can experience premium television content on their PCs without the use of a TV Tuner card or external hardware, including premium TV content like Setanta Sports, E!, ESPN, MTV, E4, Five and over 50 other channels.

This is quite unique within our industry, as service providers have had difficulties licensing premium TV content for use on PCs. PC based services like Joost and the various P2P applications have not been strong on delivering live broadcast content. With the combination of the innovation from both Inuk and Industria, we have been able to change the characteristic and business behavior of our beloved television industry.

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!