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• offering technically mature and fully-fledged IPTV solutions• large Chinese movie provider as showcase customer and shareholder• small-scale IPTV systems can be realised on a tight budget• excellent video quality thanks to P2P technology

IPTV Systems by Forcetech

Forcetech is based in the ZhongGuanCun software park in northwestern Beijing. 40 software engineers and ten sales experts work at this site. An additional R&D office is located in Chengdu, where the local university offers a top-notch engineering degree program. Forcetech operates one more office in Shenzhen, since it sources OEM hardware such as encorders and set-top boxes from there.

COMPANY REPORT IPTV Solution Provider Forcetech, China

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188 TELE-audiovision International — The World‘s Largest Digital TV Trade Magazine — 07-08/2013 — www.TELE-audiovision.com

A friendly welcome by the Forcetech receptionist.

Hello World!

IPTV is steadily gaining popularity, as it gives small and even tiny content provid-ers a platform for offering their services on a truly global scale. The question that arises is: Where can you turn to for a fully-fledged IPTV solution? Force-tech is a company that has the answer. It offers everything you require in terms of soft-

ware for managing an IPTV offering as well as hardware such as IPTV boxes for

clients. Forcetech is based in northern Beijing, and we visited the company

to find out what it’s made of.The Chinese capital Bei-jing is home to countless software businesses, and a number of well-known companies have chosen the northwestern part of the metropolis, close to

the Xierqu station of metro line 13 as a place to do business. Baidu (the Chi-nese counterpart of Google) has its huge headquarters right around the corner, and a bustling location like that is just the right place for an innovative company like Forcetech. Lan Haidong is in charge of marketing at Forcetech and gives us a brief company overview. “Forcetech CEO Mr. Arojoy Wei founded Forcetech in the year 2004. He had studies computer technology at university and has always

M1905 is the name of the online portal operated by CCTV-6. Not only does CCTV-6 use Forcetech software for its online movie service, it also has a shareholding in Forcetech.

COMPANY REPORT IPTV Solution Provider Forcetech, China

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Lan Haidong is the Marketing Manager at Forcetech. The official name of the company is Force Innovation Technology Co., Ltd. as can be seen in the background.

shown persistent interest in streaming systems.”

Together with his staff of eight, six of which were software engineers at the time, Forcetech CEO Mr. Arojoy Wei de-signed streaming software for commer-cial applications during the initial phase of his company. State-run institutions such as schools and universities as well as industrial enterprises ranked among his first customers. Forcetech software was implemented on the websites of those customers for streaming video content. Lan Haidong gives the example of “lectures at schools and universities” that could be accessed online for viewing at home.

At the time, all streaming software was based on so-called multicast technol-ogy, which means every client received his or her stream directly from a central content server. Things changed in 2008, when Forcetech launched a P2P (peer-to-peer) version of its software. What was different from then on? With P2P all connected streaming clients at the same time function as active multipliers and forward the received signal to additional clients. Lan Haidong: “P2P improves the quality of the received signal, above all.” Signals need not be fed from a central server any longer, but can be received

The Forcetech Sales team with TELE-audiovision editor-in-chief Alexander Wiese: (from left to right) Sales Manager Ren Nan, Sun Wenya, Marketing Manager Lan Haidong, Wang Qinghua, Dong Peng and Guo Tianwei.

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1. Meet Peng Dong. He is one of the software engineers and works on optimising the user interface of Forcetech software. 2. Liu Ming is the Development Manager for Android systems.3. Wang Yong is the Development Manager for Linux systems.

from another client close-by.In its first years of existence, Forcet-

ech was a strictly Chinese company, which means that only customers within China were able to order from Forcetech. The year 2011 saw a major change in that strategy, mainly thanks to the ad-vent of CCTV-6 as a major shareholder. CCTV-6 is a movie channel that is avail-able all across China and which created its own Internet offspring by the name of M1905 (www.m1905.com). Hundreds of movies can be accessed through that portal, some of which are available even before their screening date on TV. This, of course, presented an ideal opportu-nity for Forcetech to prove its streaming software’s worth. Lan Haidong has some impressive facts for us: “M1905 has two million subscribers and an average of 400.000 prime time viewers that simul-taneously access movies from M1905. At those peak times the required bit rate is in excess of 100 GB per second.”

Lan Haidong adds even more interest-ing details: “Each server is capable of taking care of up to 1000 clients, which means that for M1905 we adjusted our streaming software to handle more than 400 serves simultaneously.” With China

being such a huge country, servers are spread out all over the nation in so-called data centers. “We have some 50 data centers in the whole of China.” This way each single client can be guaranteed the best possible video quality.

Thanks to new shareholder CCTV-6 Forcetech could finally cast an eye on the international market as well. “Our soft-ware product has currently reached an extremely sophisticated level and with M1905 we have a brilliant showcase for our solution, which lends prove to our claim that we can easily deal with a huge number of clients.” Within only a short time Forcetech was able to significantly increase overseas sales. “Today we gen-erate 40% of our total turnover outside China.” Recalling the initial phase of over-seas business, Lan Haidong remembers that the first overseas orders came from Spain and Thailand and adds that Thai-land, in particular, has shown a strong demand for Forcetech IPTV software ever since.

What is it that Forcetech can actu-ally provide? “We offer an end-to-end solution for IPTV, and by that we mean streaming software, software for moni-toring the stream, management software

for subscriber administration, encoders for feeding video signals into the system and of course IPTV boxes at the clients’ end.” The other question is the one about money. Once again, Lan Haidong has all the details: “A mini system for approxi-mately 100 subscribers will set you back USD 20.000 at most, plus 15 to 20% of that amount per year for service und software updates. If you need to accom-modate 1000 subscribers you’re looking at one-off costs of around USD 75.000.”

Who wouldn’t want to set up their own IPTV system with competitive prices like that? As a matter of fact, TELE-audiovi-sion will test a Forcetech IPTV solution first hand and you’ll be able to read what we think of the system in one of the up-coming issues. Forcetech has definitely tapped into a lucrative market segment and major IPTV operator M1905 clearly underpins the level of excellence Force-tech’s software has reached.