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TeliaSonera reveals content ambitions with multimedia deal

TeliaSonera International Carrier announced a three-year contract to provide a combination of services including live streaming, video-on-demand (VoD) and secure storage to the Swedish Hockey League.

The Hockey League will use TeliaSonera's server-based platform and network to distribute its web TV channels and interconnect Swedish hockey clubs.

The service could extend beyond content broadcast to allow social networking between supporters. In addition, the Swedish Hockey League intends to use the service to simplify the task of selling and managing broadcast and Web content rights to third parties, explains Åsa Boström, senior manager of media and CDN, TeliaSonera International Carrier.

And even though the contract is unlikely to be the carrier's most profitable, it provides a shop window for TeliaSonera International Carrier at a time when wholesale carriers and equipment manufacturers are developing new content delivery and brokering services.

"For us the solution we are giving is (about) more than ... the money. It's really showing what we can do. The fact that we are being paid is even better," said Boström, who declined to give details of the value of the deal.

The service is new for TeliaSonera IC in that it ties together a large number of its existing content management and distribution capabilities in a single package.

"We do similar things [in other contracts], but not the combination where you have all the media services," said Boström.

TeliaSonera International Carrier now wants to broaden into the international distribution of content using a similar model.

"We are in discussion with lots of companies outside Sweden. Sport is a key target group," said Boström.

Still, the company is not ruling any potential customers out. "It's for any content right holders…that would like to bring their content out into the world and not via the open Internet," said Boström, who explained that the company can adapt content for mobile phones, TVs or computers and add social networking capabilities.

However, TeliaSonera International Carrier is far from alone in having ambitions in the content distribution market.

Approximately eighteen months ago Ericsson launched a multimedia brokering business that creates "an HDTV feel and adapts it to many different screen formats and codecs," explained Stefan Hedellus, head of strategy at Ericsson's multimedia business unit.

Ericsson then caches the content locally for rights holders. "It's one of many areas that could grow to be big", said Hedellus.

Today Ericsson's multimedia business unit is its smallest, but it still generates revenues of several billion Swedish kroners, said Hedellus.

"We believe we can take a fair piece of the market. If not, it's not a big investment," he said.

Such developments bring operators and equipment manufacturers into closer competition.

"There are moves by operators to do these sorts of things and AT&T will wholesale computing power, said Hedellus.

Nevertheless, "our competitors are traditional web caching guys," he said, adding that "the role of global distributor of media content has not been entered by any operator."

Yet TeliaSonera's Boström argued TeliaSonera goes a step or two further.

"We have the network, platform and service, and broadcast and take signals. We already have a social networking feature that could be adapted," she said.

Meanwhile Cisco also has big ambitions that incorporate social networking features, albeit slightly different.

In January Cisco officially launched Eos, a hosted service that sets out to make it easier for media companies to create Websites that analyse usage of any content they put on online, be it music, TV programming or film, and provide social networking platforms for site users.

Eos, for example; can analyse the activity of a visitor across a given company's site to detect patterns between consumers of music and video programming, for example.

Eos will also provide a range of communication tools such as chat, as well as RSS feeds.

Источник: Total Telecom

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