Last week, our partners at Tech Mahindra organized a dinner/presentation with Clive Selley CIO, BT Wholesale to discuss key challenges in IPTV deployments. Clive shared some of BT's plans, competitors, assets and challenges for IPTV. BT's DSL network services more than 8 million subscribers across the UK and is working aggressively to roll-out IPTV services in the next months. The OSS/BSS integration was one of the key challenges that BT is looking at. It's important to note that Tech Mahindra was one of the early supporters/adopters of the OSS/J initiative who recognized the value of using open standards for OSS/BSS integration - their main expertise.
Content (interactive service, video-based applications), customer experience (programming guide, personalized content/identity, and communications services including presence, voice, IM) are other clear challenges that need to be addressed to make IPTV a real business model for carriers. I shared with the group, how carriers like BT can help content creators promote their content, maximize their advertising revenue, and accurately track usage in a way that is unique to IPTV technology. This will provide a clear business differentiator in delivering television services to the projected 53 millions IPTV subscribers by 2009.
In the coming months, I will share details of Sun's initiatives and products that are helping carriers successfully deploy and manage IPTV services by harnessing participation on the network and the power of Java on the STB, network infrastructure, and back-end systems.
