Ericsson: Tandberg Is Key to IPTV

Ray Le Maistre (3.9.07)
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=119124&site=cdn


Ericsson is looking to purchase Tandberg Television and secure a hold in the IPTV market.

The successful acquisition of Tandberg Television would help Ericsson play catchup with some of its main telco TV rivals in terms of technology, customers, and deployment experience, says one of the executives behind the bid for the encoding systems specialist.

In addition to the high-capacity video encoding and compression systems for which it is best known, Tandberg TV also has important applications-focused technology, such as headend-based advert insertion capabilities.

Those capabilities would significantly bump up Ericsson's portfolio in terms of video-specific technology, integration experience, and reference customers, areas where Ericsson has some catching up to do.

Ericsson has also been working with its mobile handset partner, Sony Corp. , to develop IPTV user interfaces that "have the same look and feel as the Sony Playstation in terms of the look and feel for navigation. We're going to do a lot of customer research to find out exactly what consumers want."