General

Sezmi: An Alternative to IPTV

This hybrid solution of IP and broadcast TV may prove cheaper to roll out and thus more attractive than IPTV to ISPs.

by Gerry Blackwell [August 22, 2008]

IPTV? Who needs it? If you can believe Silicon Valley start-up Sezmi, nobody does, least of all ISPs shooting for a triple play. And at this point, there is no reason not to believe.

Sezmi says its TV solution, due to begin roll-out near the end of this year, will be cheaper by far for broadband service providers to implement than IPTV, offer a significant price advantage over cable and satellite services, and deliver superior signal quality too.

The company boasts innovative technology and a gilt-edged set of content and technology partnerships that will, it claims, let it deliver about 83 percent of the content available from traditional providers.

Oddly, the Sezmi solution doesn't actually involve sending video over broadband—or not much of it anyway. It will piggy-back instead on existing over-the-air digital broadcast networks to deliver both broadcast and cable network content, and then integrate that with web-based content at the set top box.

"Some of the secret sauce that makes this incredibly attractive to ISPs is that we've created a content delivery network with the ability to get massive amounts of video out to the market very inexpensively," says David Allred, the company's senior vice president of marketing and product management.

"It offloads the [video] traffic from the broadband ISP's own network. Delivering video over telco infrastructure puts a pretty heavy load on it. Even if you're using ADSL2+, it's a significant challenge."

Sezmi, funded to the tune of $18.5 million by a brace of top venture capital firms, is the brain child of serial tech entrepreneurs Buno Pati and Phil Wiser. Pati and Wiser, long-time friends on parallel but never intersecting careers paths, got together two years to brainstorm ideas for a business they could start together.

They looked first and longest at digital media. Wiser had founded Liquid Audio, an internet music pioneer. More recently, he'd served as chief technology officer at Sony Corporation of America (SCA), a fine vantage point from which to get "the big picture" of digital media opportunities. Pati brought "company building" expertise.

A fresh solution
The partners were looking, says Allred, for markets that were "ripe for disruption." Pay TV was an obvious choice.

Or perhaps not so obvious given the emergence of IPTV, which was also aiming to disrupt it. But Pati and Wiser understood the problems and pain points for ISPs and telcos around IPTV. They were able to use their years of industry knowledge and draft additional expertise to come up with a completely fresh solution.

Here's how it works.

Sezmi will deliver three types of content. It has deals in place to redistribute big network and other digital TV channels available over the air. It has also negotiated rights to 'cable' network and on-demand video content from studios. And it can deliver specialized, small-audience content from the web—Allred calls it "long tail" content.

This in aggregate is the claimed 83 percent of what Americans watch. It's not clear what the missing 17 percent includes.

All of it is fed to a Sezmi set top box (STB), and viewers can select any of it using a conventional onscreen channel guide. But each of the three different types of content is in fact delivered to the home differently.

A second piece of customer equipment, the media receiver, a smart antenna device, sits inside the house and receives signals over the air from local and regional broadcasters.

Those broadcasters, through partnerships Sezmi negotiated with them, also deliver the cable and on-demand material. They receive it via satellite feed from the Sezmi network operations center (NOC), co-located at a Harris Corp. facility, and distribute it over the airwaves using unused capacity.

The media receiver receives and descrambles these signals, and the set top box decompresses them and integrates them with the direct over-the-air channels. The web content, of course, is delivered over the service provider partner's broadband IP network.

The media receiver is one key to the Sezmi solution. Allred is a little vague about the technology itself, but explains, "we brought together the foremost experts in wireless reception—some of the same individuals who helped innovate with WiMAX, Wi-Fi, and [cellular]—and we applied many of those same techniques to TV."

The very idea of relying on over-the-air broadcasting for pay TV distribution is a radical notion, but when you understand the background, it begins to make sense.

The reason cable and satellite supplanted over-the-air broadcasting as the disribution mechanism for TV in the first place is that they could easily, if at a price, deliver many reasonably high-quality signals, while eliminating the need for rooftop antennas. Rooftop antennas never worked well, anyway, even for pulling in a few channels.

The problem with antennas was where to point them. Transmissions were apt to be coming from all directions on the compass. You might be able to pull in signals from transmitter towers to the north and east, for example, but you'd miss out on channels transmitted from towers to the south and west. Antenna systems that involved mechanically moving the antenna were clumsy at best.

Worse, the broadcasters were transmitting at, as Allred puts it, "insane" power levels, causing serious multipath interference problems—which resulted in the ghosting and multiple images in analog over-the-air reception that gave cable and satellite providers their opportunity to move in.

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