IPTV

As I walked in to the recent IPTV World Forum 2008 show at Olympia in London I was almost overwhelmed by the number of set top boxes on show. There were also a lot of head end server systems as well as myriad test tools and equipment. It reminded me of the IT trade shows I went to long ago. It seems to me that IPTV is hanging its hat on quality of service for TV distributed by ISPs like BT Vision whose model is so similar to broadcast as to be almost indistinguishable. One USP to the ISPs is that there are bundled facilities here to prevent churn - things like caller ID on your TV. My impression is that there are just too many players for the market to support. I think this for two reasons. First is that even if everyone deserts cable and satellite in favour of IPTV there are too many. But perhaps more significantly I think they have missed a trick. It's possible to get pretty much all of Freeview via the Internet now. If you add in all the other sources of TV then the choice far exceeds that on traditional broadcast channels. And one final and probably most significant thing, the Internet allows creator and consumer to cuddle up close to one another without the distributor getting in the way. Just like the music and porn industries an easy to reach global market means that it is now practical to consider producing niche interest television. Well maybe they want us to miss that trick. If we subscribe to a cable, satellite or IP channel then the choice we get is from what they offer and that's it. They aren't going to host niche interest stuff because there's no profit in doing that. Even video on demand isn't going to make that stuff available because it just isn't worth their while. So maybe a model where we aggregate the stuff we want will succeed.

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