IPTV World: Competitive challenges lie ahead

CHICAGO - TVN Entertainment CTO Dom Stasi sounded a bit of an alarm when he spoke to delegates at the IPTV World North America conference by noting that sometime after February’s digital transition for American broadcasters, U.S. cable companies will likely drop the bulk of their analog channels in favour of digital – which is going to “open up about 400 channels,” he said. “That gives them virtually infinite bandwidth for which to compete.” (U.S. over the air broadcasters must stop broadcasting in analog on February 19th, 2009.) With the development of compression technologies – i.e. MPEG4 – that amount...