Greetings Earthlings!

Regrettably, this seems to be the salute with which some of the consumer-facing TV solutions of today approach their audience – albeit in the context of unintuitive user interfaces, chaotic navigation and indecipherable messages.

Lets face it: The time has come to Pimp your UI™!

I must confess that I am really stealing the tagline of the Zignal TV Platform retro-fit solution for existing IPTV deployments. Retro-fit? Yes, apparently there are a lot of folks out there with an early IPTV investment that they want to keep, while still benefiting from the advances in general usability and user-interface design.

By paying attention to existing deployments, Zignal addresses an urgent need, providing new functionality, seriously better looks and new commercial features, running side by side the existing IPTV solution – without re-investing a penny in technology that is already there.

Taking all the exciting greenfield operator ideas and concepts and making them available to the established IPTV operators is a major step in the evolution towards open platforms and non-proprietary connected entertainment systems of the future. Way to go, Zignal!

At a recent meeting with a European telecommunciations incumbent, we were faced with an interesting situation: The telco’s existing DSL network and the associated infrastructure was complex and fragile enough for it to be both technologically risky and unreasonably expensive to upgrade existing systems to carry an IPTV service.

Our solution: Run the IPTV project as an internal greenfield operation, managed by Industria but owned by the telco. Set the performance criteria (functional specs) and do it within the time and budget constraints. Simple!

In any technological environment it will inevitably become more and more complicated to do everything within one system, so by hooking up the different subsystems through a good services platform, we can have the best of both worlds: Harnessing the power of the existing infrastructure when deploying new services, without the hassle of messing with unrelated systems.

In techspeak, it’s like a Service Oriented Architecture approach to business. When the subsystems / services rely on one another through well-defined interfaces, they can be independently upgraded and improved without breaking any business processes: A recipy for fast market reaction times and efficient network operation - which no longer need to be polar opposites.