Andy Bechtolsheim was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems with Scott McNealy. In 2003, Andy went and founded Kealia, a super-secret startup that was building a distributed, high-availability video server of some sort called Streamstar. In 2004, Sun Microsystems aquired Kealia.

Why should we take notice? It appears that Sun spots IPTV as a significant business opportunity.

"We are going to go to carriers and offer an end-to-end IPTV solution," says Darrell Jordan-Smith, VP of Sun's global telco industries group. "We'll offer everything from the streaming technology, the processing technology, the storage technology, the Web services technology, the set-top box technology -- all the way down to the devices themselves."

Scott, way to go there! I am glad to see that you have limited yourself to just one piece of the IPTV pie. Could there be anything else? Why yes there is; and it is near and dear to my business heart.

Indeed, Bechtolsheim's pitch to broadcasters at the NAB2005 conference earlier this year highlighted network-based video recording capabilities -- a sort of gigantic TiVo that serves thousands of users much like a Web server hosts thousands of customized Web pages.

"The advantage is that the ad insertion behavior is completely under central control, and can range from no-skip to mini-ads... to any other business model that is acceptable to advertisers," Bechtolsheim noted in his presentation.

Informitv says that Sun is understood to be offering carriers an end-to-end solution in partnership with other suppliers.

Among these could be interactive television software provider Digisoft, based in Ireland. Sun gave an IPTV demonstration in conjunction with Digisoft at the Supercomm conference in Chicago last month. Digisoft provides interactive television applications and application management for the MHP and OCAP platforms, which are both based on Java.