At the TV center, within Ericsson’s Gothenburg office at Lindholmen: customers – the operators – come to study how Ericsson builds IPTV systems and to hear how Ericsson can maximize the business potential and minimize the technical limitations of their networks. This is also where Ericsson employees from all over the world come to learn how IPTV works from a commercial and technical standpoint.

IPTV is expected to become telecom operators’ next big business, thanks to the fast deployment of broadband networks and a deregulated TV market. The technology is advancing quickly, the networks are in place and the operators have systems to charge for their services.

Henrik Ericsson is responsible for IPTV operations within Ericsson Solution Area Content and Media. He describes a typical customer visit: “Before the customer comes to the TV center, we’ve already found out what they want to know, so we can show our solutions to meet their queries and demands.

“The customers bring along their marketing people, who sit in front of large screens in the display room, built as a living room, discussing how to make their IPTV offering attractive to consumers. Customer technicians are taken to the lab where, together with Ericsson staff, they discuss, and are shown, the end-to-end technical parts; everything from the set-top box in the homes to the end-to-end operational management of an IPTV solution.”

Apart from the technical solution the customer technician’s focus is very often linked to questions about provisioning, network management, quality assurance, charging and related operational managements of the services.

The TV Center is currently working on the integration of the Mobile TV solution to show the business potential of converged TV.

“An area that usually impresses is that we have an IMS-based demo ready. IMS is the standard for the future of IPTV and other multimedia communication,” Ericsson says.

“We are now evolving our solutions with IMS, which is one important enabler for convergence between IPTV and Mobile TV. Converged TV will be the next-generation TV, which will change the way people watch TV – an individual TV experience on any device, any time, anywhere.”

Did you know that ...
... about 15 million people have IPTV today? In five years, almost 100 million people are expected to be able to watch TV via broadband.
Source: Ericsson