Alcatel-Lucent enhances triple play architecture, giving service providers the foundation for unrivaled video quality, personalization and interactivity

Monday, September 29th, 2008
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BRUSSELS — At the Broadband World Forum 2008 tradeshow and exhibition today, Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) is announcing a significant evolution of its industry-leading Triple Play Services Delivery Architecture (TPSDA), providing a foundation for service providers to deliver superior video quality, with greater personalization and interactivity.

The enhancements to TPSDA offer a more cost-effective and flexible platform for high bandwidth services such as HDTV, an improved IPTV user experience “• with immediate channel changing and more reliable TV service “• and helps to facilitate the insertion into TV programs of advertisements that are targeted to specific communities or localities, in turn enabling the development of new TV advertising business models.

This evolution of TPSDA “• dubbed “TPSDA 2.0” “• is powered by enhancements to the Alcatel-Lucent broadband access and IP/MPLS portfolios that will be available starting in early 2009. TPSDA 2.0 is a key element of Alcatel-Lucent’s broader initiative to enable service providers to leverage their IP-based networks to enhance and evolve the TV and video viewing experience to make it more compelling for subscribers, while opening new revenue opportunities. Toward this end, Alcatel-Lucent is driving the development of smart, IP-based, video-centric networks that offer subscribers a consistent and high-quality, personalized and interactive viewing experience.

“Given the pace at which the Internet world is evolving, the challenge all operators face is how to cost effectively evolve their delivery infrastructure to meet growing customer expectations for an instantaneous high quality entertainment experience,” said Jouni Forsman, VP Research, Gartner. “Operators must aggressively pursue a strategy that will protect and grow their broadband-enabled revenues.”

The enhancements add application layer intelligence to the TPSDA network elements enabling them to cache, store, stream and splice video content as well as to characterize application layer content. As a result, TPSDA 2.0 is able to deliver new features such asimmediate channel change and re-transmission with considerable cost savings,assuring a superior, uninterrupted viewing experience. In addition, TPSDA 2.0 enables mass scaling of unicast/personalized services, even with HDTV, by optimizing the content delivery.

This is critical since network-based services such as time-shifting, pause TV and personal video recorders (PVRs) are becoming extremely popular but can be expensive to deliver as they impose massive bandwidth demands on the network when used with high concurrency. By distributing and integrating these capabilities into the network elements instead of in centralized or distributed servers, TPSDA 2.0 provides operators with a scalable and cost-effective foundation to serve all of these options from the network, allowing them to continue to grow and expand their business.

“With the move to digital, high-definition content, combined with a boom in video consumption and increased demand for personalization and interactivity, service providers are evaluating their service delivery architecture and business models with an eye toward the delivery of premium digital content,” said Michel Rahier, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s carrier business activities. “Alcatel-Lucent’s TPSDA 2.0 provides IPTV operators with a proven, cost optimized foundation for the delivery of a next generation interactive HDTV television experience – giving those operators a genuine opportunity to eclipse the quality of experience enabled by traditional broadcast technologies. It also helps lay the groundwork for the introduction of targeted advertising, which ultimately will help add a new dimension to the TV business model.”

The enhancements in TPSDA 2.0 also help support Alcatel-Lucent’s new Targeted and Interactive IPTV Advertising solution, introduced today, which is designed to increase IPTV revenue by making it easier for advertisers to reach the most attractive potential customers with ads that are more timely and relevant.

TPSDA is the blueprint architecture to accelerate IP network transformation for delivery of video, voice, data and entertainment services. The architecture leverages Alcatel-Lucent’s industry-leading broadband access, optics, Carrier Ethernet and service-aware IP technologies, and combines them with robust subscriber and network management, security capabilities, and a comprehensive suite of design, deployment and integration services.