THE NORTH AMERICAN CABLE industry is getting a little full of itself gloating over the ongoing delays in telephone company launches of its so-called IPTV.
This Internet protocol television, most actively and publicly spurred on by Microsoft, is the way that North American telcos must pursue delivering wired digital television. Short of overbuilding with a new cable system, telcos must go the IPTV route since IP-delivered television is the only way to funnel digital TV through the traditional telcos’ twisted pair copper telephone wire.
It’s not about delivering television to PCs or TVs over the Internet. It’s about using Internet protocol technology to compress and securely deliver video efficiently on tight networks.
However, as reported last month by www.cartt.ca, delays are what’s new in the IPTV world at the moment. Both SBC (huge American RBOC) and Swisscom (national telco of Switzerland) have had to rein in their video plans due to certain technical issues with Microsoft’s IPTV.
And, during Wednesday’s Bell Canada Enterprises teleconference with financial analysts, those foreign delays were brought up with BCE’s management, who brushed them aside saying Bell’s anticipated initial launch in 2006 (with trials beginning before 2005) was scheduled farther out than what SBC and Swisscom tried to do and shouldn’t be a problem here. Bell is relying on Microsoft to make its IPTV solution work for full rollout across its new broadcast distribution undertaking territory of Southern Ontario and Quebec.
“What you’ve seen from some of the other companies – in fact, most of them – you’ve seen they are coming back to our plan… our deployment plan that we announced a while ago. On our side, it’s still in the lab, it’s working fine, we’re working closely with Microsoft,” said Bell Canada’s group president, consumer markets, Pierre Blouin.
“We’re working closely with some of the RBOCs in the U.S. that are working on IPTV as well and are on the same plan as (BCE).”
During last week’s CTAM Conference in Philadelphia, a panel which included an executive each from Cox Communications (the third-largest U.S. MSO with 6.7 million cable and phone customers), Microsoft, and telco Verizon Communications (which has a digital TV over telco service in the market), tackled the IPTV question.
The panel agreed that IPTV was a stupid moniker for the new technology because when people hear “IP” they think streaming and the blocky, unreliable web video images we’ve all downloaded at one time or another.
One panelist added that no one calls streaming radio or MP3 downloading “IP audio”, so why call this IPTV?
Bob Ingalls, Verizon’s president of retail markets said IP will eventually “become the core of how consumers get content.. in the long run, IP is positive.”
In the end, IPTV will be invisible to most. Just a way to get digital video from point A to point B.
“(IPTV) has just become a catch-phrase for next-generation video,” added Cox’s senior vice-president of strategy and development, Dallas Clement.
“IPTV is just TV,” explained Microsoft TV’s director of marketing and communications Ed Graczyk, but with the ability to enable many more applications. Think of delivering multi-window viewing on the TV screen, allowing customers to choose sports camera angles, having text voice-mail delivered to the television set and many other options. “It’s TV as part of a bigger set of services,” he added.
Plus, it could be portable – where if you’re a Verizon Fios digital TV customer, for example, as long as you can plug your TV and digital decoder into a decent telephone line, anywhere, you can get your package of channels. Think about live TV blogging or instant messaging – screen to screen either on your TV and those of multiple friends – or maybe some of them are watching and IM-ing from their cell phones or laptops instead.
And, when it comes to targeted advertising, many media planners and broadcasters now are thinking about sending several ads over a cable plant, each to certain nodes where demographics dictate, for example, that a Mercedes dealership might want to advertise – while the rest of the town gets the Pontiac ad. However, with IPTV, different ad messages could go to different televisions – within the same home – so that while mom sees the Benz ad in the living room when watching Canadian Idol, junior sees the iPod spot in her bedroom instead.
And, if you run a data network – and I don’t know of a cable operator that doesn’t – you’ll know that IP will not be just a telco solution. IP is a pervasive thing that runs on all networks.
The great thing is that once Microsoft and the telcos figure it out, cable will have another technology to more efficiently and cheaply deliver content on.
Right now, cable’s QAM has the lead. Its tried and true technology on a nice fat pipe beats the telco’s skinny twisted pair and the new technology being jammed down the line. But this advantage won’t last for much longer. With the money and expertise companies like SBC and Verizon and Bell Canada and Microsoft can throw at a challenge like this, well, we’ll let Liberty Media’s SVP and CTO Tony Werner say it, as he did at June’s SCTE Conference in San Antonio: “They ultimately will get it right.”
Believe it. IPTV will work soon enough. And, it’ll work on any plant, thereby levelling the playing field for all wired network operators.
