Another year gone by. IBC always sneaks up on us so fast! This year in Hall 4 (Stand A75) we’ll be showing the new version of our Dreamgallery™ Middleware and Portal Generator, which will be available to customers in July 2010.
We are still one of the only independent middleware providers left on the market. Being independent meants that we can allow operators to select the best of breed solutions to compliment their offering, respond to changing market demands and remain flexible to offer the best user experience to subscribers. The Portal Generator brings the Dreamgallery™ “What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get” user interface to a new level. Operators can add new interactive services and see changes take effect in real time, making it easier than ever for them to create a business portal and push revenue generating opportunities to customers.
Dreamgallery™ is maximizing operator flexibility and performance without compromising on speed, by taking advantage of the powers of open standards, such as HTML and SVG. Combining the Portal Generator with the SDK that is provided with Dreamgallery™, operators may extend and adapt the services to their specific needs, including easy customization and regionalization of the user interface. We have developed a high definition user interface with great client performance including applications such as poster views and cover flows similar to that of iPhone applications. The introduction of our Next Generation middleware is dynamic enough to dramatically optimize the response times and speed of IPTV services while providing outstanding GUI opportunities and performance for HD graphics.
Visit us at IBC and follow us on twitter to see daily updates about whats going on leading up to IBC @DreamparkTV
Come visit us in Stand #169 at IPTV World Forum in London on March 23-25. We’ll be talking about our Front End solution designed to help operators get the maximum flexibility. Our front-end solution allows operators that already have a middleware solution in place to add new services in real-time and to really see what they are getting and exactly how it will look for the user. Operators running DreamgalleryTM software may fully control the business portal.
Visitors to IPTV World Forum will be able to demonstrate this solution and see how easily changes can be made to the Middleware instantly.
If you are interested in a meeting, please send an email to exhibition@dreampark.com.
If you are media or an analyst and would like to get a briefing from Dreampark at IPTV World Forum, please contact our PR representatives,
Alex Crabb or Jennifer Hicks at:
+1-617.956.2214 or +33 6 84 47 80 42
Alex@theinkstudio.com or Jennifer@theinkstudio.com
Twitter: alexcrabb and jennalee
Make sure you follow @DreamparkTV on twitter to get all our latest updates from the IPTV World Forum show floor and the inside scoop on whats happening inside our booth!
IPTV is a just a technology, transferring video over IP. So, how can a technology, IPTV, become a part of a new consumer TV lifestyle? Can it change the way we relate to the TV or more importantly, how we interact with the TV.
We believe all the elements are in place and you will start to see them become a part of the IPTV offering and deliver a new TV lifestyle to the consumer.
Endless amounts of content: New capabilities such as Video on Demand (VOD), client and network PVR, web sites offering video and the availability of digital content are making the world flat. Content can be offered from any place on the globe at any time. The concept of channels and schedule is becoming almost meaningless to most TV consumers today.
Rich user experience: Goodbye to boring programming guides, hello to new visual guides. Users demand a great user experience from everything they do on TV. They have come to expect it. They want to navigate the TV the way they do on their computer. It must be clear, crisp end enjoyable. Operators who seek ways to differentiate their service offering will need flexible software and SDK to allow them to change every bit of the way their TV looks and feel.
Personalization: With vast content resources users will need new ways to navigate around. The holy-grail is search-less search. Smart recommendations, tags and subscribe-notify mechanisms will be the way to let users find what they want without typing a single word. A lot of intelligence is now invested in trying to guess your needs and help you find your needle in the pile of content.
New type of applications: Dreampark’s Portal Generator allows operators to easily evolve and to support fast introduction of new services. Using an intuitive What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor will empower the operators to also customize and renew existing services and look and feel to keep the subscribers engaged with their offerings.
Blended services: IP infrastructure allows easy mixing of services from different domains. Voice, video, data and mobile can be stitched together to create new type of applications. Caller ID on TV, Informational widgets on TV and mobile picture to TV are just a few such examples.
Home networks: Multi-room TV and local programs, music and pictures will become a part of the household assets. See your household content wherever you like it, stop it in one room and continue in another or share a clip across all screens in the house is becoming a viable option with new standards for home networking.
Web 2.0: Communities, social networks, recommendation sharing and new types of user-generated content will all be part of the new wave of Internet applications. Expect to find many of these new ideas migrating from the computer to the IPTV environment and changing the way people interact with and consume their TV services.
Any device: TV on any device is a worldwide mantra. You will someday be able to see your TV on PC, Mobile or any device you can imagine and do it anywhere in the world.
As we have stressed, IPTV has what it takes to become a new and incredible experience for TV watching. While some of these elements above will be available only in the future, they still represent the powerful benefits that IPTV can bring to the television viewing experience. Dreampark is on the edge of innovation with its own Dreamgallery™ middleware to help operators make IPTV a more dynamic and user friendly experience. Dreampark remains committed to providing user friendliness, openness, flexibility and a unique TV application feel.
In the complex world of broadband television, there is no single component that has as much impact on the success and cost-effectiveness of a service as the middleware. The selection of the middleware platform is a key milestone in service roll out success.
The role of middleware is essentially to serve up the user interface, connect client devices, video servers and encoders, provide the administration interface, implement the business logic, store and submit the usage information, interface with the legacy systems (billing, CRM, authentication, NMS) and offer a platform to sustain a completely reliable service. Middleware maintains the equilibrium between stabilizing a mission-critical service with zero-tolerance for failure and simultaneously supporting a dynamic service allowing operators to incorporate new STBs, new video servers, new business rules and applications.
We’ve noticed a trend where operators who already have a middleware solution need more flexible front-end solutions to integrate with their middleware providers’ back-end. Operators having a first generation middleware solution or a customized solution are often lacking the flexibility of doing changes in the portal, adding new applications or even to customizing the User Interface etc. This becomes increasingly important when competition among operators is getting tougher.
Operators need to be able to add and change applications. What is lacking in most solutions is an administration tool that addresses this task and allows the Operator to be in control of both the Look-and-Feel and also the contents of the Portal. The Dreamgallery™ system takes this one step further in allowing the Operator to see the changes take effect in real-time on the actual Device that is used by the subscribers. Once the verification is done the Operator may publish the new additions and/or changes to all subscribers.Dreampark calls this “What-you-see-is-what-you-get.” Operators need to be able to create a business portal and push revenue generating opportunities to customers without a lot of help from the middleware provider. And, it’s easiest for them to do this if they can see what things will look like as they are adding to the portal in real-time.
Dreampark has taken the opportunity to create a front-end solution that will allow operators that already have a middleware solution in place to add new services in real-time and to really see what they are getting and exactly how it will look for the user. Operators running Dreamgallery™ software may fully control the business portal. This is could be the best thing to ever happen to an operator with regards to middleware. Freedom and flexibility is everything.
Post By: Bjorn Lang, chief technology officer, Dreampark
