Alcatel-Lucent announces a significant evolution of its Triple Play Services Delivery Architecture (TPSDA), providing a foundation for service providers to deliver superior video quality, with greater personalisation and interactivity. The enhancements to TPSDA offer a more cost-effective and flexible platform for high bandwidth services such as HDTV, an improved IPTV user experience - with immediate channel changing and more reliable TV service - and helps to facilitate the insertion into TV programs of advertisements that are targeted to specific communities or localities, in turn enabling the development of new TV advertising business models.

This evolution of TPSDA - dubbed "TPSDA 2.0" - is powered by enhancements to the Alcatel-Lucent broadband access and IP/MPLS portfolios that will be available starting in early 2009. TPSDA 2.0 is a key element of Alcatel-Lucent's broader initiative to enable service providers to leverage their IP-based networks to enhance and evolve the TV and video viewing experience to make it more compelling for subscribers, while opening new revenue opportunities. Toward this end, Alcatel-Lucent is driving the development of smart, IP-based, video-centric networks that offer subscribers a consistent and high-quality, personalised and interactive viewing experience.

The enhancements add application layer intelligence to the TPSDA network elements enabling them to cache, store, stream and splice video content as well as to characterise application layer content. As a result, TPSDA 2.0 is able to deliver new features such as immediate channel change and re-transmission with considerable cost savings, assuring a superior, uninterrupted viewing experience. In addition, TPSDA 2.0 enables mass scaling of unicast/personalised services, even with HDTV, by optimising the content delivery.

This is critical since network-based services such as time-shifting, pause TV and personal video recorders are becoming extremely popular but can be expensive to deliver as they impose massive bandwidth demands on the network when used with high concurrency. By distributing and integrating these capabilities into the network elements instead of in centralised or distributed servers, TPSDA 2.0 provides operators with a scalable and cost-effective foundation to serve all of these options from the network, allowing them to continue to grow and expand their business.

The enhancements in TPSDA 2.0 also help support Alcatel-Lucent's new Targeted and Interactive IPTV Advertising solution, introduced today, which is designed to increase IPTV revenue by making it easier for advertisers to reach the most attractive potential customers with ads that are more timely and relevant.

Alcatel-Lucent is a recognised leader in IPTV, with the #1 position in IPTV middleware subscribers (2+ million), TPSDA deployments (55+) and IPTV transformation and integration projects (50+). These transformation projects leverage Alcatel-Lucent's extensive field deployment experience and lab investments in next generation IP Transformation Centers to reduce time to market and deliver a superior user experience.

TPSDA is the blueprint architecture to accelerate IP network transformation for delivery of video, voice, data and entertainment services. The architecture leverages Alcatel-Lucent's industry-leading broadband access, optics, Carrier Ethernet and service-aware IP technologies, and combines them with robust subscriber and network management, security capabilities, and a comprehensive suite of design, deployment and integration services.