Network equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent sees India as the next big market for its video services, including network-based recording called digital video recording (DVR). This is a popular service in Europe and will catch up in India once high speed broadband through fibre is made available, according to Paul Larbey, President, Video Business Unit, Alcatel-Lucent.
The company’s Chennai research and development centre had in the last two years played an important role in developing cloud DVR for its clients. “We hope to see big wins in the next 12 months. We have started negotiations with some of the operators,” Larbey told Business Line .
In cloud DVR, programmes recorded by users are stored in remote servers instead of set-top boxes (STB).
This allows the service provider to give increased storage space and not worry about changing the STB hardware configuration and specifications frequently. Once stored in a cloud, a user can access the content in a tablet, personal computer or a mobile. This is not possible with an STB, he said.
Globally, video networks are evolving with people migrating from STBs to cloud DVR, said Larbey. The company is providing this service to eight customers, including Telecable, Swisscom and Telefonica in 12 countries.
In India, the company has set up a marketing team to tap potential clients. It will ramp up the R&D centre in Chennai to nearly 100 employees next year from 75 now.
According to Larbey, the Chennai centre is involved in developing technology that will help operators have control of the video quality in a network than in a device.
The network will automatically identify the device and adjust the quality of the video accordingly. This, at present, is done by the device. However, the quality may not be that good, he said.