Held at the inaugural Gala Dinner on the opening night of the IPTV World Forum in London, the IPTV Awards 2009 celebrated the most impressive achievements from the IPTV industry worldwide over 2008-9.
The awards ceremony not only recognised the outstanding technologies developed for telecoms video services, but also showcased the best solutions from the full IPTV ecosystem beyond just pure-play IPTV.
Several new categories were added to recognise excellence in IPTV service marketing and to promote the activities of operators and content providers in the IPTV space. As such, for the first time the shortlist included a number of content and operator companies, including AT&T, Telekom Austria, PCCW, Belgacom, Portugal Telecom, BesTV (China), BBC iPlayer, Canal+ and NBC Universal. The awards ceremony, coming on the back of the first day of the world's largest event in the IP and video market, reflected the international reach of IPTV, with short-listed nominees representing countries from North America to Europe and Asia Pacific.
The panel of high-profile judges, comprising consultants, analysts, solutions-providers and publication editors in the broadband arena, assessed the quality, innovation, leadership and achievements of the entire IPTV value chain for ten separate awards.
Out of a field of five short-listed solutions, Pace and CANAL+ were awarded the prize for the Best Hybrid Broadcast-IP Video Delivery Solution or Service, for +Le Cube, which is Europe's first Satellite/IP hybrid PVR set-top box to use the Ethernet port for VOD services. The STB was selected as the best hybrid video-delivery solution supporting the delivery of video over both the IP and non-IP video networks in parallel, and was recognised for both its stylish design and innovative content and services.
GoBackTV received the award for the Best Cable IPTV Technology, in recognition of its RetroVue Cable IPTV Solution with CMTS-Bypass. GoBackTV's solution was a particularly impressive entry and exceeded many of the judges' expectations for this category. The RetroVue Cable IPTV Solution is integrated with several IPTV middleware systems, taking it beyond basic delivery and helping it stand out from another strong field of nominees.
The Best Quad Play Service prize, a category that recognised an outstanding quad-play service combining TV and internet with mobile and fixed telephony, was awarded to PCCW's snaap! service. Judges noted the price of the package and its impact on the market as a whole, recognising how PCCW's innovative cross-platform service enabled its users to share digital photo albums on TV screens, computer monitors via broadband, mobile handsets and PCCW's 'eye' multimedia device, while providing free-of-charge data transfer.
Miniweb Interactive was the recipient of the Best Interactive Service or Application, in recognition of the Miniweb Interactive Service Platform. From the five short-listed nominees, judges were most impressed by Miniweb Interactive's ability to allow internet content to be redeployed as an interactive TV service, and to provide a solution for delivering interoperability. A strong indication of the service's impact on the market lay in the fact that Miniweb's open, standards-based platform is deployed in over 9 million homes on the Sky Digital platform in the UK.
In an award sponsored by Huawei, AT&T received the prize for the Most Innovative New Service, which recognised an outstanding service delivered over a managed network that made a significant contribution to revenues and customer satisfaction. Judges were impressed by the way that AT&T's U-verse Total Home DVR solution allowed U-verse TV customers to watch HD and SD DVR recordings on other connected TVs in the home and watch up to five HD programs simultaneously throughout the home.
The Best Internet TV Technology or Solution, an award sponsored by ZTE, was presented to Brightcove for its Online Video platform. For this category relating to video available via the public Internet, the judges rated Brightcove's online video platform highly, since it provided an integrated solution for a range of video publishing and distribution needs and, because it is built on open standards, it enabled customers to create highly customized players. Its impact on the market was apparent from the fact that more than 100 participating companies are currently building services on top of the Brightcove platform.
The BBC iPlayer on the Virgin Media platform was recognised as the Best On-Demand Technology for IPTV. The success of the iPlayer offering over a managed IP network was measured by an impressive 11 million views per month reported by Virgin in the first 4 months of service on its closed network. The award also recognised the widespread celebration of the iPlayer's ease of use and navigation.
In a very close-run category recognising an operator, service provider or ISP that a chieved significant subscriber growth for a managed IPTV service, AT&T won the award for Best Subscriber Growth Achievement for its U-verse offering. AT&T impressed the judges by breaking through the magic mark of 1 million U-verse TV subscribers by the end of 2008, adding more than 800,000 U-verse customers in 2008 alone, even in a competitive and economically-challenging environment. Its leap from just 3,000 U-verse TV subscribers at the end of 2006 to a service that was available in 82 markets in 16 states by the end of 2008 provided a clear indication of its remarkable growth.
Another popular and closely-contested category was for Best IPTV Service Delivery Platform or Client Software, which was awarded to Ericsson for its IMS IPTV middleware solution. Judged on the uniqueness of its offering and its impact on the industry, Ericsson's entry was particularly interesting to the judges because its IPTV middleware is the world's first commercially available IPTV middleware integrated with IMS. The solution allowed multiple services to be blended seamlessly across different platforms, and the middleware also gave operators the flexibility and scalability required to deploy a personalized and interactive TV experience and, ultimately, to make IPTV a mass-market proposition.
Finally, in a category rewarding the outstanding contribution of a single individual to the development of IPTV, Paul Berriman, Chief Technology Officer at PCCW, was presented the Special Merit Award for Outstanding Industry Contribution, sponsored by Ericsson. In recognition of both the immediate impact and the long-term legacy of his contribution in the IPTV arena, the award was given to Berriman for his role at PCCW in pioneering IPTV developments and for pushing forward one of the largest-scale multi-play IPTV deployments in the world from both a commercial and technical perspective.
As the industry looks ahead beyond the success of the World Forum event to the future of IPTV, it was fitting for Berriman to be rewarded for his pioneering work, not least as the judges felt that, in the long-term, it is PCCW that will increasingly be recognised as the archetype of a multi-play, post-IPTV operator that the cable industry will struggle to match.
