It's an IPTV World

WPW_Feedbot · #1 (**permalink**) 07-28-2005, 08:00 AM

I know, my head's been all on IPTV lately. It happens when you're working on a report -- you focus sharply on that topic. But there really has been quite a bit of news on IPTV lately. Telecom Italia has begun free trials of their IPTV service, with a full offering scheduled for introduction later this year. France Telecom's MaLigne TV service now has 116,000 subscribers (warning: PDF; check slide 25) -- up 69% since the new year. And in a completely new market for IPTV, Sistema Multimedia has launched an IPTV service in Russia.

For once, the US is behind the rest of the world on something. But there has been some interesting IPTV-related action stateside as well. Time Warner is trialing "broadband TV" in California. But, like the Sky service here in the UK, we don't define their offering as IPTV, becaues it's just TV to the PC. Unlike Sky's VOD-to-the-PC service, though, the Time Warner offering is multichannel-to-the-PC. That's more interesting, and certainly is a first step towards doing true IPTV on a TV screen. (But I'm still perplexed as to why anyone thinks TV to a PC is a good idea.)

Also stateside, SBC swears their planned spring '06 IPTV trials won't fall behind schedule. I'd argue that if you're a telecom and you're not even trialing IPTV until 2006, then you're probably very far behind schedule. But that's a question of strategy rather than project management....

Read more...