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(English) Alphabetical list of IPTV monitoring solution providers

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To keep this list down to manageable size, I'm only including companies that provide a complete solution for monitoring an live IPTV service.

There are start-ups mixed with decades-old companies. Later-on I'll share some info on classifying these companies.

  • Absilion (Netrounds)
  • Agama
  • Agilent
  • BridgeTech (Sencore)
  • Cisco (VQE)
  • ExFo (Brix)
  • First Media (m-View)
  • Ineoquest
  • Infovista
  • IP Label Newtest
  • Ixia
  • JDSU (Volicon)
  • Mariner Partners (xVu)
  • Miranda
  • Mirifice
  • Mixed Signals
  • Opticom
  • Pixelmetrix
  • Psytechnics
  • Radcom (more of a VoIP specialist)
  • Shenick
  • Spirent
  • Symmetricom
  • Tektronix
  • Telchemy
  • Video Clarity
  • Witbe

Please comment to add to this list.

Ben

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(English) Why IPTV will change the world … well at least the world of TV

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In the decade after the Second World War, the art & science of modern Marketing were invented and brought the world economy into a new age. Services delivered over an IP network, like IPTV, are bringing something as momentous forward.

In an article I wrote in 2006 for the Technology Review’s inaugural French edition (it actually got published in the second), I drew a parallel between IPTV and the printing press.

IPTV has to first be TV before it can be anything else. Indeed even in today’s Web 2.0 world, users will never try all the great new IPTV services including niche - long tail & interactive content, personalisation or community services, if you don’t first give them some real TV. If THE content people want isn’t available IPTV – or any other TV – providers will have a problem. To start with IPTV doesn’t necessarily innovate. It is bringing us something we’ve had for half a century. Sure we’ve gone from Black & White to colour TV, image resolution has improved along with sound quality and even 3D is on its way, but the basic live TV service is the same.

Electronic Program Guides (EPG) are becoming the norm, offering instant access to at least the program title, schedule and a short description. But these are linked to digital TV, not necessarily IPTV. Other services not necessarily requiring IP include Personal Video Recorders (PVR) which have advantageously replaced VHS video recorders to make recording programs easier and even let you record straight off the program guide or via a web site or mobile phone interface. But common man’s life will be more radically changed by the IP part of IPTV than the TV part.

So if the TV in IPTV is still TV, it must be the IP that’s the printing press.

TV preceded IPTV by decades just like manuscripts preceded Guttenberg’s printing press by dozens of generations.

By innovating in the way written works were duplicated and disseminated throughout communities and beyond, Gutenberg changed society forever.

But it took generations of writers to realise the potential of books over manuscripts. Political pamphlets and newspapers are examples of world-changing output from the printing press but these only had a measurable impact a few generations after Guttenberg.

It’s taking IPTV a lot less time to realise the potential of IP. The first real deployments are a decade old and the first large scale deployments are half that age.

When TV is delivered though an IP network, be it the Internet or a private network, a unique one-to-one bi-directional relationship is created between the service provider and the end user. This will open up a world of new services targeting much smaller audiences that can be scattered around the globe like Diasporas. A VoD session can even be seen as a service being sold to an individual household.

In 2000 the Internet infrastructure couldn’t cope with video streams. YouTube alone has shown that that it now can. As long as some form of net-neutrality can be maintained, new “narrow cast” services like many of the long gone Web-TVs of the Internet bubble are at last viable. Digital catalogues have reached critical size so that however unusual, there will always be some content to cater for your interests. So if content remains king in the IPTV world, he’s growing a “long tail”.

Let’s just stop for minute; think what that implies going back to the world economy as it emerged from the Second World War. After the Marshall plan put European economies into forward gear, a relatively long period of prosperity ensued.

The basic operational model for most businesses was this: to optimise production, create a stock of goods (or services) then get a sales force to sell as much as possible. In the relationship between a company and its customers, it was always about pushing as much stock as possible from the stockpile to the customer and optimising that flow as seen from the companies side. It took a particularly astute and creative sales person to ask a few simple questions:

  • How do our customers perceive our products?
  • Why would they choose one brand over another?
  • What features would make my product more valuable?
  • How might they “feel” if our product or service was unavailable?
  • Once my product has been bought, how is it used in my customer’s home?

This was a radical change and we are looking at the relationship from the customer’s perspective for the first time and talking about the invention of “Marketing” itself.

My premise is that with IPTV as well as other IP based services we are very much in the position of a salesman of the late fifties. Indeed we can design, build and deliver a leading edge IPTV service, but once it has left our “factory floor” and reaches people homes, just like the goods of the fifties, its gets used and perceived in a ways we don’t really understand.

We have all experienced frustrating times talking to customer support about issues we are having with our ISP, VoIP or IPTV service. The customer representative invariably makes us do stupid things like check the mains power socket, but if they do listen to our specific issues they rarely understand - let alone have a solution. Why is it so hard to manage the Quality of Experience in the IP world?

One reason is that contrary to the tangible goods of the fifties and sixties, IP services don’t actually exist until they are consumed. Indeed it is difficult to improve the experience of a Video on Demand session in advance. This is one of the reasons the whole science of marketing has to be adapted to the world of IP.

One last point shows how fundamental the changes we are talking about are. The heavy investment big names like Google or Yahoo! are making in the TV space is telling. I don’t believe Yahoo!’s current set of TV widgets providing news, weather & stock market information in their current form as an overlay will change the world, but they are showing the way. For such initiatives to succeed, at least three breakthroughs are necessary.

The first is in the TV ecosystem, which has to enable the free flow of new services and content so that whoever has a good idea for a widget or new service can somehow provide it. This is like Apple’s AppStore on the iPhone.

The second major shift required is in the TV service interface. Indeed, with a Standard Definition (i.e. non HD) screen and a regular remote control it is hard to behave differently than a “couch potato”.

Thirdly widgets to make an impact on the living room experience, they will have to become truly interactive with the content itself, a bit like with the demos NDS gave at the 2009 IBC.

So in the end IPTV isn’t just another bit of technology but a new paradigm. We are so close to TV that we probably won’t realise the world is changing until someone tells us it already has.

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(English) The future of TV advertising Conference

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A few months ago I helped Justin Lebbon to sketch out the initial outline for the Future of TV advertising conference in London on December 11th 2009. Have a look at the incredible speaker line-up that Zero Point Media and he have put together here.

This is the intro I wrote for the brochure.
From a techie background I always love it when I can work on things that ordinary people can understand, i.e. when you don’t feel such a nerd at dinner parties. Well TV advertising is something people really do care about.
Here is a conversation I had a few weeks ago when my neighbours came over for dinner.

She’s a print journalist and he puts up solar roofs so neither are at all connected to TV advertising. I told them I was planning to chair this event and this is what how I remember the conversation going:

Her: “Hey Ben that sounds cool. You know I might loose my job within the year because our daily just can’t re-invent itself on the web. I mean we get loads of visitors on the website, but it just doesn’t add up financially [I’m translating from the French so no pun was intended - and yes there are two d’s]. Aren’t you going to be talking about the same kind of thing with advertising: I mean at home we just fast-forward through most ads using the PVR. Like with my whole newspaper, the web is kind of slowly killing ads on the TV?”

Me: “Well err, I think …”

Him “OK yes maybe but if adverts could at least be interesting, then maybe we wouldn’t want to zap them all the time!”

Me: “well …”

Her: “Oh yes and I remember as a kid, always being cross with my dad if we were late for the ads at the cinema, they were an integral part of the experience.”

Me: “Yes indeed personalisation…”

Him: “But wait Ben, back to the first point, I mean doesn’t more and more TV come from the web anyway so couldn’t advertisers actually know who is behind each TV set?”

I then gave up trying to participate.

Her: “But darling, we get our TV from Orange so doesn’t it come from the Web anyway?”

Him: “Well I err think it’s what Ben called IPTV, and …”

That’s a much as I can remember. There’s enough food for thought there for a book’s worth let alone a blog post, and that’s from a layman’s perspective alone. Some of these issues were covered in detail at the conference http://www.futuretvads.com.

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(English) Telco’s : if you can’t beat DTT, at least get on the bandwagon

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[lang_en]After launching IP-only boxes in France in 2003, Orange started to included DTT tuners in all its boxes from 2006. So at the launch of DTT in France some Orange customers already had an IP/DTT hybrid box before DTT coverage had actually reached their home.

But in France, when excited neighbours came to say they had a DTT box ready, an IPTV subscriber could answer back with their digital TV line-up that was already available with VoD also. Orange’s head start over DTT meant that most IPTV subscribers still today watch mainly IP channels despite the back that the box can receive and decode DTT. Orange, like its French competitors Free, SFR, Darty and the new entrant Bouygues now offer some exclusive channels which are not part of the national DTT line-up for free.

DTT rolls out in built up areas first and so it wasn’t until 2007 that a significant amount of subscribers were inside the DTT footprint without being eligible to IPTV. By then Orange had its hybrid IP/satellite offering ready and has been quite successful with it as they can also reach they still grey areas of DTT coverage.up

For the more mature operators DTT has been both an opportunity and a threat. The threat was of course of loosing customers to more reliable and cheap non-connected DTT zappers. The opportunity was of having a piece of a very much larger cake.

In a market where analogue TV is still predominant, the promise of IPTV is harder to sell. But once the whole market is moving towards digital anyway, customers can be easier to hoax towards the charms of interactivity that will always be IPTV’s strong suit like with an enhanced interactive EPG or community and communication widgets.

Despite being a positive influence overall, DTT brings a thorn into customers support centres. Bad DTT Reception can cost hybrid IPTV operators a lots of customer support money.

But what now of those operators who have not been able to launch in time?

If the local DTT market is already ripe or DTT will be launched in a similar time frame to the IPTV offering, a different strategy must be adopted.

DTT poses the threat of keeping fledgling IPTV service out of the market. So if you can’t beat the DTT bandwagon then join it. Using a Trojan horse will let an operator sneak back in to the TV space as soon as they’re ready.up

BT kind of did this, but instead of a supped-up “glass half full”, zapper they brought an IPTV service to market which without IP channels which turned out to be a half-empty glass for subscribers. From my viewpoint across the channel, BT has not been very successful. They came out of the woods too late for a head to head contest with Sky and Virgin, and too early for the lower profile approach suggested here.

For operators still to finalize plans, mainly T2 and T3’s, a possible tactic could be to subsidize a DTT zapper with Telco branding that has a return channel and some extra power. For the example of a DVB-T market, that’ll represent 50-80$ for an entry-level box instead of say 30$. It is important to spend an extra $ or two on the form-factor so the “box” is a desirable object (i.e. preferably not in the shape of a ordinary box).

Depending on market conditions, this super-zapper might even be sold with the promise of future interactive services even if they’re not ready yet. So the operator would only need to CAPEX the subsidy, not the whole cost.

In the worst case customers use the zapper unconnected, but still have the Telco Logo sitting next to the TV. There will always be scenarios to win-back the subscriber to an IPTV offering later on. These could for example start simply with a much better EPG or maybe a targeted catch-up TV service for one kind of popular program.

In the end IPTV holds the promise of much better interactive services than DTT, but for time to market issues, turn DTT into an opportunity not a threat.up[/lang_en]

[lang_fr]After launching IP-only boxes in France in 2003, Orange started to included DTT tuners in all its boxes from 2006. So at the launch of DTT in France some Orange customers already had an IP/DTT hybrid box before DTT coverage had actually reached their home.

But in France, when excited neighbours came to say they had a DTT box ready, an IPTV subscriber could answer back with their digital TV line-up that was already available with VoD also. Orange’s head start over DTT meant that most IPTV subscribers still today watch mainly IP channels despite the back that the box can receive and decode DTT. Orange, like its French competitors Free, SFR, Darty and the new entrant Bouygues now offer some exclusive channels which are not part of the national DTT line-up for free.

DTT rolls out in built up areas first and so it wasn’t until 2007 that a significant amount of subscribers were inside the DTT footprint without being eligible to IPTV. By then Orange had its hybrid IP/satellite offering ready and has been quite successful with it as they can also reach they still grey areas of DTT coverage.haut

For the more mature operators DTT has been both an opportunity and a threat. The threat was of course of loosing customers to more reliable and cheap non-connected DTT zappers. The opportunity was of having a piece of a very much larger cake.

In a market where analogue TV is still predominant, the promise of IPTV is harder to sell. But once the whole market is moving towards digital anyway, customers can be easier to hoax towards the charms of interactivity that will always be IPTV’s strong suit like with an enhanced interactive EPG or community and communication widgets.

Despite being a positive influence overall, DTT brings a thorn into customers support centres. Bad DTT Reception can cost hybrid IPTV operators a lots of customer support money.

But what now of those operators who have not been able to launch in time?

If the local DTT market is already ripe or DTT will be launched in a similar time frame to the IPTV offering, a different strategy must be adopted.

DTT poses the threat of keeping fledgling IPTV service out of the market. So if you can’t beat the DTT bandwagon then join it. Using a Trojan horse will let an operator sneak back in to the TV space as soon as they’re ready.haut

BT kind of did this, but instead of a supped-up “glass half full”, zapper they brought an IPTV service to market which without IP channels which turned out to be a half-empty glass for subscribers. From my viewpoint across the channel, BT has not been very successful. They came out of the woods too late for a head to head contest with Sky and Virgin, and too early for the lower profile approach suggested here.

For operators still to finalize plans, mainly T2 and T3’s, a possible tactic could be to subsidize a DTT zapper with Telco branding that has a return channel and some extra power. For the example of a DVB-T market, that’ll represent 50-80$ for an entry-level box instead of say 30$. It is important to spend an extra $ or two on the form-factor so the “box” is a desirable object (i.e. preferably not in the shape of a ordinary box).

Depending on market conditions, this super-zapper might even be sold with the promise of future interactive services even if they’re not ready yet. So the operator would only need to CAPEX the subsidy, not the whole cost.

In the worst case customers use the zapper unconnected, but still have the Telco Logo sitting next to the TV. There will always be scenarios to win-back the subscriber to an IPTV offering later on. These could for example start simply with a much better EPG or maybe a targeted catch-up TV service for one kind of popular program.

In the end IPTV holds the promise of much better interactive services than DTT, but for time to market issues, turn DTT into an opportunity not a threat.haut[/lang_fr]

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(English) IPTV World Forum Eastern Europe 2009 Roundup

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[lang_en]The turn out subjectively seemed to those who I spoke with, to be disappointing, but Informa, the conference organisers, were as always upbeat pointing to the 60+ operators present and the 20+ exhibitors. So I suppose, as the recession isn’t officially over, the glass is over half full.

The conference was setup around cosy tables so it was hard to judge the audience size but there were always between 50 and 100 people present in the conference.

The conference was branded with “quality of experience” and there was some effort to get that into the titles of some of the talks. But what I saw of day one talks didn’t reflect that. I suppose it’s the editorial control issue here. Informa can’t enforce much, the upside of which can be some surprising talks. One speaker I spoke to actually admitted to not really knowing what quality of experience actually is … I picked up a few snippets like from Michal Taborsky that Telefonica O2 has no plans on OTT yet and that HD is delivered in a best effort mode and so not charged for yet in the Czech Republic.

Sebastian Becker, founder, thebrainbehind, stood in as chair on day two. He was surprised by how cautious Russia seems to be with IPTV. It was surmised that torrent users are dominating/ruining this market. Croatians on the other hand seemed bullish on IPTV probably because of the lack of cable there.up

Mihai Crastelnau made a good presentation about the myths of content sourcing that we all say is so veeeeeery difficult, namely because you can’t work with studios. Well that may no longer be the case. It is however still not so easy to get all the details right like the metadata, subtitles, dubbing, encoding, etc.

A learning that OTE shared with the audience was that there should be a significant gap between the price for double play and triple play. Iskon in Croatia uses 25%, which seems to fit the market well.

The Orange IPTV advertising experimentation seems to be still in very early days, like the red button was in 2003. Orca and Dreampark both gave convincing middleware presentations. Finally Sebastian noted how NBC Universal showed their new channel branding strategy is a way to become must-have channels. Their message to platforms is (surprise-surprise) to focus on quality rather than quantity.

Overall, Sebastian Becker thought it was a good show considering the circumstances, although as chair he regretted that the audience didn't ask many questions.

The exhibition was well laid out in such a way that, unlike in London, no booths were stuck in the corner off the beaten track. Informa cleverly served a scrumptious desert in the middle of the exhibition so there was plenty of passage.

I randomly dropped into some booths of companies I didn’t really know.

Gravity is a Hungarian start-up in the recommendation space. They proudly stated at the booth that they were “Founder of the overall best Netflix prize best team”, but I never got to the bottom of that and everyone in this space claims some sort of link. Their demo worked fine, but with a database of 120 movies at the show I was unimpressed. If I get the time I’ll try out their half collaborative filtering half metadata approach on the web with a real database.up

I was more impressed by the DS2 booth. DS2 is a Spanish chip and reference design company for power line communications (PLC) devices. Their chipsets end up in the PLC devices from the likes of D-Link or Netgear. They compete with Intellon (also at the show) and claim a few USP’s like a TR-069 client option for just an extra $1. This could enable an operator to do things like upgrade a device firmware or reboot a customer’s PLC device. As we look towards more and more commitment from operators to manage IPTV services this looks like a really smart move.

DS2 sell a tiny daughter card for $16-20 which will let you integrate PLC into other devices, so it could for example be in the modem-router and STB of the operator straight out of the box.

The big news for folks in the PLC market is ITU-T’s ratification just this month of the G.hn standard that will enable true compatibility between vendors (hmmm sounds familiar, I thought that was already the case, I suppose it can’t be). DS2 say they’ll have new 400 Mbps devices ready and compatible by the end of 2010. Current devices are at 200 Mbps. Remember to halve all published rates between the physical layer advertised and what is achievable at o-an IP level. The dynamic range (i.e. how far you can get two PLC devices to talk to each other) isn’t expected to change though. So if it doesn’t work in your home now, it won’t any time soon.

As Evertz are at most of the IPTV shows and I have no idea what they do, I thought I’d stop by to find out. The first good news is that they come from Canada. They sell - and do correct me if I'm wrong with the technicalities - 3RU racks where you can slot up to 15 cards each of which takes an SDI input and spurns out an MPEG stream ranging from 1 to 20 Mbps. So I deduct that they do encoders. The company website (which feels uncannily like you’re at the Hertz rental car company) did little to help deepen my understanding. I’ll try the literature next time and anyone from Evertz please feel free to contact me for proper write up.

I stopped off at the Open IPTV Forum booth where I had three green t-shirted friendly people all to myself (hmm wonder who pays for that). Starting from 8 founding members in 2007 they boast an impressive 58 paid-up members. They have no pure-play middleware vendors (Ericsson doesn’t count because they supply the whole ecosystem). If they did have, say, Dreampark, it could help to get their specs off the white-boards and into live deployments.up

As I passed the Orca booth, Sefy Ariely, VP Sales & Marketing at Orca Interactive, grabbed my arm and told me he was a bit cheesed off [with me] about the comments I’d made in my last piece about them showing the Compass demo over and over at show after show (Read IBC 2009 report on Middleware). I told Sefy I had been nice because not only was it repetitive, but getting less interesting than it was in the beginning. Sefy, being a seasoned professional, had an answer to every objection. It was first just a concept demo, now it’s a real product. It looks like we just have to accept that real products are less exciting than demos.[/lang_en]
[lang_fr]The turn out subjectively seemed to those who I spoke with, to be disappointing, but Informa, the conference organisers, were as always upbeat pointing to the 60+ operators present and the 20+ exhibitors. So I suppose, as the recession isn’t officially over, the glass is over half full.

The conference was setup around cosy tables so it was hard to judge the audience size but there were always between 50 and 100 people present in the conference.

The conference was branded with “quality of experience” and there was some effort to get that into the titles of some of the talks. But what I saw of day one talks didn’t reflect that. I suppose it’s the editorial control issue here. Informa can’t enforce much, the upside of which can be some surprising talks. One speaker I spoke to actually admitted to not really knowing what quality of experience actually is … I picked up a few snippets like from Michal Taborsky that Telefonica O2 has no plans on OTT yet and that HD is delivered in a best effort mode and so not charged for yet in the Czech Republic.

Sebastian Becker, founder, thebrainbehind, stood in as chair on day two. He was surprised by how cautious Russia seems to be with IPTV. It was surmised that torrent users are dominating/ruining this market. Croatians on the other hand seemed bullish on IPTV probably because of the lack of cable there.haut

Mihai Crastelnau made a good presentation about the myths of content sourcing that we all say is so veeeeeery difficult, namely because you can’t work with studios. Well that may no longer be the case. It is however still not so easy to get all the details right like the metadata, subtitles, dubbing, encoding, etc.

A learning that OTE shared with the audience was that there should be a significant gap between the price for double play and triple play. Iskon in Croatia uses 25%, which seems to fit the market well.

The Orange IPTV advertising experimentation seems to be still in very early days, like the red button was in 2003. Orca and Dreampark both gave convincing middleware presentations. Finally Sebastian noted how NBC Universal showed their new channel branding strategy is a way to become must-have channels. Their message to platforms is (surprise-surprise) to focus on quality rather than quantity.

Overall, Sebastian Becker thought it was a good show considering the circumstances, although as chair he regretted that the audience didn't ask many questions.

The exhibition was well laid out in such a way that, unlike in London, no booths were stuck in the corner off the beaten track. Informa cleverly served a scrumptious desert in the middle of the exhibition so there was plenty of passage.

I randomly dropped into some booths of companies I didn’t really know.

Gravity is a Hungarian start-up in the recommendation space. They proudly stated at the booth that they were “Founder of the overall best Netflix prize best team”, but I never got to the bottom of that and everyone in this space claims some sort of link. Their demo worked fine, but with a database of 120 movies at the show I was unimpressed. If I get the time I’ll try out their half collaborative filtering half metadata approach on the web with a real database.up

I was more impressed by the DS2 booth. DS2 is a Spanish chip and reference design company for power line communications (PLC) devices. Their chipsets end up in the PLC devices from the likes of D-Link or Netgear. They compete with Intellon (also at the show) and claim a few USP’s like a TR-069 client option for just an extra $1. This could enable an operator to do things like upgrade a device firmware or reboot a customer’s PLC device. As we look towards more and more commitment from operators to manage IPTV services this looks like a really smart move.

DS2 sell a tiny daughter card for $16-20 which will let you integrate PLC into other devices, so it could for example be in the modem-router and STB of the operator straight out of the box.

The big news for folks in the PLC market is ITU-T’s ratification just this month of the G.hn standard that will enable true compatibility between vendors (hmmm sounds familiar, I thought that was already the case, I suppose it can’t be). DS2 say they’ll have new 400 Mbps devices ready and compatible by the end of 2010. Current devices are at 200 Mbps. Remember to halve all published rates between the physical layer advertised and what is achievable at o-an IP level. The dynamic range (i.e. how far you can get two PLC devices to talk to each other) isn’t expected to change though. So if it doesn’t work in your home now, it won’t any time soon.

As Evertz are at most of the IPTV shows and I have no idea what they do, I thought I’d stop by to find out. The first good news is that they come from Canada. They sell - and do correct me if I'm wrong with the technicalities - 3RU racks where you can slot up to 15 cards each of which takes an SDI input and spurns out an MPEG stream ranging from 1 to 20 Mbps. So I deduct that they do encoders. The company website (which feels uncannily like you’re at the Hertz rental car company) did little to help deepen my understanding. I’ll try the literature next time and anyone from Evertz please feel free to contact me for proper write up.

I stopped off at the Open IPTV Forum booth where I had three green t-shirted friendly people all to myself (hmm wonder who pays for that). Starting from 8 founding members in 2007 they boast an impressive 58 paid-up members. They have no pure-play middleware vendors (Ericsson doesn’t count because they supply the whole ecosystem). If they did have, say, Dreampark, it could help to get their specs off the white-boards and into live deployments.haut

As I passed the Orca booth, Sefy Ariely, VP Sales & Marketing at Orca Interactive, grabbed my arm and told me he was a bit cheesed off [with me] about the comments I’d made in my last piece about them showing the Compass demo over and over at show after show (Read IBC 2009 report on Middleware). I told Sefy I had been nice because not only was it repetitive, but getting less interesting than it was in the beginning. Sefy, being a seasoned professional, had an answer to every objection. It was first just a concept demo, now it’s a real product. It looks like we just have to accept that real products are less exciting than demos.[/lang_fr]

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(English) Q: Is DLNA ready for living-room action? A: Almost.

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This afternoon I was to prepare tonight’s Indian meal and decided to put on some music. I like it nice and loud perhaps as a reminder of my teenage years or maybe because past 40 hearing drops, who knows. Anyway I was alone at home so the time was right.

My new Bravia 5500 series TV is hooked up to the stereo system with an HDMI cable and connected to my home network. An Apple Time-Capsule acts as an Ethernet hub for all my sitting room devices (TV, BlueRay, multimedia hard disk, PC’s). The family Vista PC with the MP3 collection was switched-on so I decided to try and listen through the TV. I’d seen demos at shows, checked I could do it myself when I got the TV six months ago, but this time it was to actually listen to music rather than play with technology.

The whole operation took about twenty seconds and lo and behold everything worked first time.

I hit the big ‘Home’ button on the Sony TV remote, scrolled to the ‘music ‘ section, and bingo: the PC appeared. So I selected it and started playing the first MP3 I came across. It was a Mozart piano concerto and sounded brilliant.

With my wife and three kids adding to the collection, there are tens of thousands of files of absolutely every kind of music imaginable. The DLNA client on the TV found its way to the root of the music collection that is managed by iTunes on the PC. I could navigate by genre (with the typical issues like having to choose between ‘classical’ or ‘classique’ as we live in France) or by subdirectory. In this case it’s a matter of luck with some explicit names, but many meaningless ones.

I wanted to listen randomly to titles and found that option on the TV. It seemed a shame not to use the 46” screen with its 1920*1080 resolution, so tried to get a slide show of family photos to display at the same time.

I selected the current music as background and used the TV remote to navigate to my photos (again simply pressing the ‘home’ button).
I selected ‘all photos’ and got the slide show working. As the default setting must be file date I got stuck watching our oldest digital family photos I’d forgotten about.

I was now getting a bit behind schedule for the dinner party preparations.
The Mozart piece I’d selected lasted about 20 minutes, so after that time I realised that I was not getting what I wanted, namely to watch my photos and listen to my music.

One can only set one piece to accompany a slide show and there’s no option (yet) to have a slide show accompany music (which was actually my state of mind).

So I gave up on the music and decided to satisfy myself with the photos alone. But as the photos were in chronological order, I soon ran out of the small 200Kb files from the very early digital cameras. As I got to a more current 3MB file size, the loading times became unusable at about half a minute. I presume the TV’s chipset is a bit underpowered for high-res photos. I haven’t and don’t want to investigate the technicalities of this slowdown. I just want it to work.

Another limitation was that you can either see the whole picture, in which case part of the screen isn’t used as the camera uses different aspect ratio or have the photofit the screen exactly by being cropped. Mac and PC based photo software has got us used to much nicer solutions with the best of both worlds were photos either scroll across the screen or zoom out so you can see all of them.

My initial feeling of elation at how it all worked was waning so I went back to the music and got the tandoori paste around the chicken in time (oh and btw I usually just grilled the meat, this time I tried slow cooking in the oven wrapped in silver foil, follow by a quick grill on one side to dry and brown it – it was much more succulent than usual).
So my tupence worth from this mixed experience is:

• DLNA already works in the living room, not just on trade show demos
• You need a powerful device to manage big files or HD and current TV for example don’t yet pack enough oompf
• The embed software on TV’s just isn’t user friendly enough

I am left with the feeling that there still is room for various flavours of set-top-box technology to flourish, including an Apple TV or a PC under the TV. But I wonder how long for until the set-makers get it right.

(This blog was first published on Videonet http://www.v-net.tv/NewsDisplay.aspx?id=193&title=dlna-works-for-real)