Telefónica and Simmin develop TV roaming
Spain’s Telefónica and Siminn, Iceland’s largest telecommunications operator, have successfully carried out the first proof of concept for TV roaming.
Both companies have been able to demonstrate the feasibility of distributing video services with local delivery when the user is on a visited network by interconnecting their CDNs using the Open Caching standard defined by the Streaming Video Technology Alliance (SVTA). The integration based on this standard has been carried out between the Broadpeak CDN, provider of the CDN technology used by Siminn, and Telefonica CDN (TCDN), which is the proprietary technology used by Telefonica to distribute video content in its footprint.
The tests have focused on a scenario in which a Siminn user accesses their TV service from Spain through the Telefónica network and is delegated to the Telefónica CDN (TCDN) for local delivery instead of a single delivery remotely from the Siminn CDN in Iceland. For now, the tests have been done using lab environments, but the goal is to be able to bring the same proof of concept to production in the coming months.
Commenting on the tests, Bjarki Jónsson, team leader for TV services at Siminn, said: “We are excited about this partnership with Telefónica as it has the potential to offer our customers a great experience based on open standards when using our services when traveling abroad, keeping our operating costs low”.
Ruben Mellado, director of digital home at Telefónica, added: “We are pleased that as a result of our collaboration with our partner Siminn we have managed to be the first to successfully achieve this proof of concept for the optimised distribution of video services in roaming and we hope to be able to carry it out production as soon as possible. We are also confident that this TV roaming initiative will also be interesting for other operators and we can quickly add new participants”.
Telefónica and Siminn have collaborated on innovation since 2017, the year in which the Icelandic operator became part of Telefónica’s Partners Programme.
