During an IBC meeting this week, Ericsson announced that it was going into partnership with Google so that Android TV to perform with its TV Platform- MediaFirst. It also revealed that it was going to partner with Intel to make way for efficient video processing to the cloud.
The company has been in the process of reengineering Mediaroom by Microsoft after it got it from them three years back. Other operator partners view Ericsson’s multiscreen needs are urgently in need of attention and that waiting for MediaFirst to come be harnessed is not going to be that effective.
MediaFirst cloud-based services, TV to be precise, will be extended when Android TV and MediaFirst platforms get integrated. This will also include such things as 4K-UHD live television channels, catch-up Tv, video-on-demand and cloud DVR.
People from pay TV-Ecosystem however do not see any need for the integration as they see it as another way for Google to step in and take control. There are, however, some that think otherwise.
For the operators, the partnership will allow them to benefit from the growing presence of Android TV on connected operating systems. There will be no need for extra hardware costs. With this partnership, operators will now be able with Android TV manufacturers for their TV devices and also for programming of niche OTT. Another reason is for deploying extra applications on Android OS. With the partnership, Ericsson will be able to give its users flexible, multiple and set-tops that are pre-integrated to support TV hybrid configuration.
The company in a different blog post mentioned it will also partner with Intel aimed at better encoding without giving further details. There are speculations that Ericsson intends to abandon its encoding chips to instead work with Intel for not only video processing, but also for cloud infrastructure.
Source: mspoweruser.comThere are plans by Intel to make available its Xeon processors that has been integrated with FPGAs to help improve on the performance of its data centre software. This can give room to Ericsson to plug in their AVP4000 encoding chip.
Well, this might not be a good idea after all the aim of encoding is major is purely for software which the new encoders will prevent flexibility.
The combination of Ericsson’s HDS8000 Hyper scale system of data centre with that of Intel Rack Scale Design will to a large extent promote data media centre, and this it will do by allowing hardware to be disaggregated so as to allow for better efficiency, automation, utilization, and the total ownership cost. The uses for the data centre will include processing of media, delivery, enablement of TV players and cloud DVR so as to make way for trust to be built even as they embrace technologies that are in vogue.
Another thing this partnership will achieve is for a better service delivery that will allow media players to have flexibility and any other services they feel like to the market. After the partnership, Ericsson’s TV Platform – MediaFirst and their native cloud together with SaaS approach have already made way for more development to be made. They have deployed live systems. The company is also adopting the mechanism of micro-service that is virtualized so as to give total flexibility to operational and deployment models.
The two companies are already planning to integrate 5G networks
