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Since the beginning of 2016, the global 4K market has become brisk, and major telecom operators are actively deploying 4K content and services.
Recently, China Unicom and major 4K equipment manufacturers, service providers and content providers jointly established the 4K UHD industry alliance, which reflects that 4K is an inevitable development trend of video stream media. As technologies, terminals and bandwidth become mature, and people have increasing requirements for high-quality video viewing experience, the video service, following voice, messaging, and data services, has become a basic telecom service.
“As fixed networks and mobile networks keep developing, high definition videos are popular and the 4K high definition video service will develop faster. The IPTV high-definition video service will be the main battlefield for telecom operators,” said Hua Xinhai, General Product Manager of multimedia service business unit at ZTE.
The race for 4K begins
China Unicom said it planned to add 10 million new IPTV users in 2016, boosting its IPTV broadband penetration rate to 30% in 2016 and further increase this figure to 52% in next three years.
To compete in such a huge marketplace, China Unicom founded the 4K UHD Industry Alliance that unveils its grand strategy for IPTV service, while China Telecom and China Mobile also announced their centralized procurement plans.
China Telecom currently has about 130 million broadband users and 40 million IPTV users with a penetration rate of 30%, ranking the first before China Unicom and China Mobile. It plans to purchase 11,125,300 set-top boxes in its first IPTV STB centralized procurement project. Therefore, it is expected that, at the end of 2016, the number of China Telecom's IPTV users will exceed 50 million.
As China Mobile started late in the home fixed network access domain, the IPTV HD service is definitely the best chance for China Mobile to catch up with its rivals. China Mobile announced that it would centrally purchase 10,690,000 OTT TV STBs in 2016, among which 1,230,000 with Dolby support and 9,460,000 without Dolby support, totaling 2.15 billion CNY.
We can see that China's three major telecom operators all focus on the competition of the IPTV HD service. Three development directions becomes clear: fixed-mobile convergence, strengthening pipeline capabilities, building a E2E telecom 4K service mode, aiming in enhancing telecom operators' dominant role in the entire industry chain.
IPTV Service Development As-Is of China’s Three Major Telecom Operators | |||
|---|---|---|---|
Operator | Number of Users in 2015 | Planned Number of Users in 2016 | Latest Centralized Procurement |
China Telecom | 41 million | 50 million | In the first centralized procurement of IPTV STB in 2016: 11,125,300 STBs, all supporting the 4K video service. |
China Unicom | 12 million | 22 million | In the first centralized procurement of IPTV HD STB for eight China Unicom branches including Inner Mongolia Unicom and Henan Unicom: 3,340,000 STBs. |
China Mobile | - | 15 million mobile users and 5 million smart gateway users | In the first centralized procurement of OTT TV STB in 2016: 10,690,000 STBs, among which 1,230,000 with Dolby support and 9,460,000 without Dolby support |
IPTV is evolving into IPTV+
As the IPTV HD service is booming, a brand new IPTV ecosystem of Big Video featuring openness and intelligence is forming. ZTE interprets this momentum as IPTV is evolving into IPTV+.
In the process of evolution, telecom operators have innate advantages of network and technology. In the Big Video era featuring big content, big network, big data and big ecosystem, as ZTE believed, it is critical for a telecom operator to open its platform to transform itself to a big video service provider, and provide more innovative and competitive services, thus increasing the value of data traffic.
Therefore, a telecom operator should reform its big video service platform in terms of system architecture, intelligent broadband pipeline, capability openness and user experience to build up a best-video-experience fine network which realizes 4K video to home and HD video to mobile terminals.
Reconstructing the video service system architecture and intelligentizing the video pipeline are especially important for the big video evolution. An open video capability platform can converge services and applications from multiple vendors to achieve all-win situation. In addition, the new-generation video network should guarantee high QoS of the video service and apply the big data technology to support customizing video services for users.
ZTE leads the Big Video revolution
Based on its unique insight into the future of the video industry, ZTE proposed the Big Video IPTV+ solution. With its accumulation in infrastructure network, CDN, video content platform, big data analysis platform and smart terminals, ZTE leads the Big Video revolution.
The ZTE Big Video IPTV+ solution optimizes the traditional IPTV/OTT system architecture to build up a cloudized video network that opens componentized service capabilities, CDN capabilities and terminal capabilities to the outside, as well as deploys integrated CDN to inteligentize the video pipeline. The integrated CDN supports IPTV, OTT and Cache services, fixed-mobile convergence, and integration of multiples services, as well as combines SDN's support for intelligent pipeline. The solution provides E2E visualized O&M to monitor system running status and analyze QoS. In terms of big data operation, it supports user portraits-based precision marketing including intelligent advertising, intelligent recommendation and personalized service package operation.
Moreover, ZTE offers a full spectrum of high-performance 4K set-top boxes that support cloud-terminal collaboration and multi-terminal interaction to further improve user experience.
The ZTE Big Video solution has a total system capacity of over 50 million with CDN concurrent capacity exceeding 30T. In the global IPTV market, ZTE ranks top in terms of middleware, VOD and STB products. ZTE helped Sichuan Telecom and Jiangsu Telecom put the Big Video solution into trial use in IPTV/OTT service scenarios (such as LiveTV and VOD) and large-scale commercial application that greatly increase the traffic value and monetize service capabilities.
ZTE proposed the Big Video concept and leads the Big Video revolution. As the IPTV HD video is booming, ZTE, with its profound technical accumulation and application successes, helps telecom operators develop the 4K HD service to monetize data traffic.
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