Alcatel-Lucent's Velocix and Its Strategic Alliance Program

Here's more evidence that the incumbent video infrastructure companies are quickly rolling the devleopment of solutions for multi-content and multi-platform delivery.

On Wednesday, Alcatel-Lucent announced a strategic alliance program for the Velocix Digital Media Delivery Platform to ensure that service providers can benefit from a range of pre-integrated technology components to accelerate the deployment of multiscreen consumer solutions.

Initial members of this alliance program include: 3Crowd, Adobe, Aspera, Blue Coat Systems, Clearleap, Elemental Technologies, Harmonic, Inlet Technologies, Microsoft, RGB Networks, Rights Tracker, thePlatform™, and VidZapper.

Focused on digital media delivery solutions, this program creates an ecosystem of some of the major players in the application and content provider space similar to Alcatel-Lucent’s leading role in the award winning, multi-industry ng Connect Program, which focuses on the development of next generation of broadband services based on Long Term Evolution (LTE). This open collaboration will result in innovative and creative bundled multimedia offers that service provides can quickly deploy and take to market.

This new strategic alliance program brings together key players throughout the industry to foster collaboration in four main focus areas: • Manage – For Content Management, Ingestion and Encoding • Publish – Players, EPG/UI and Feed Aggregation • Monetise – Ad management, Revenue enablers, Transaction processing • Deliver – Velocix Digital Media Delivery Platform provides the delivery capabilities Alliance members will benefit from direct interaction with engineering and development teams to accelerate solution design and enable knowledge and skill sharing to accelerate deal cycles.

Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks, KPN, and Sofia Digital in bmcoforum - multiscreen TV standard consortium

Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), Dutch telco KPN and Sofia Digital are working together in the bmcoforum to create common standard enablers for the seamless consumption of TV and video from mobile device, TV or computer.

The standard enablers are expected to enable consumers to watch live, on-demand and recorded content directly on connected TVs, PCs and mobile devices; search, select and control consumption with the mobile device; browse the Electronic Programme Guide (EPG) on a mobile device (in addition to the TV and PC screen); consume video-on-demand content, and set and view recordings with the network Personal Video Recorder (nPVR); and push in content to device storage as a background download to improve the mobile user experience.

Mediaroom and related announcements aim IPTV at smaller operators

I had announcements from Alcatel-Lucent and Sigma Designs this week regarding a Mediaroom-enabled solution aimed at smaller operators. The solution is aimed at supporting supporting networks of between 1,000 and 100,000 set-top-boxes. The solution not only provides high-quality television programming, but also enables new consumer media services through the blending and personalization of web and broadcasting content. This new offer, which uses a single equipment rack, supports more than three times as many households than previous versions of the Microsoft Mediaroom-based IPTV solution.

Alcatel-Lucent will be deploying the first instance of its Integrated Solution for Microsoft Mediaroom for Cinergy MetroNet to potentially 50,000 customers in Indiana beginning July 26, 2010. Using the Mediaroom-powered solution, Cinergy MetroNet plans to offer its customers multimedia services such as broadcast TV blended with web content and the ability to simultaneously record multiple shows while watching another.

Sigma Designs has established a new low-cost IPTV platform using the second-generation SMP8652 media processor to support lower-cost IPTV set-top box deployments.