THIS WAS THE FIRST North American version of the IPTV World conference which is put on in a number of places around the globe throughout the year by London-based Informa Telecoms and Media.
A bit surprising since North America will be leading IPTV development for the foreseeable future. Prior shows have taken place all around the globe.
“IPTV is no longer just a theoretical solution of what telcos might do in the future, but a real see it now reality,” said Ian Tapp, SVP business development for Tandberg Television, who gave the opening keynote speech on Tuesday morning.
There are 671 deployed IPTV services around the world, said Tapp, 100 more than just 12 months ago. So far, France is the country leader, with over 5 million IPTV customers, he said.
Together, Verizon and AT&T, the two largest players on this side of the pond, are expected to count 2.5 million customers by the end of 2008. Tapp didn’t mention Canada but counting the reported customers of SaskTel and MTS – and what sources tell us are decent numbers now owned by TelusTV and Aliant’s digital television service – there are over 200,000 Canadians who have chosen an IPTV provider over cable or satellite.
Here are a few other tidbits from the conference that couldn’t quite grow into full stories:
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Verizon offers a home picture network that lets consumers view their own pix anywhere in the home, including on the television, using their Verizon Fios system, and 50% of the customers report they use that application. I’d like that from my cable company.
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While a market research firm Multimedia Research Group released some very bullish stats on the global IPTV market, let’s just say we question how closely they studied the Canadian portion of their reports. Steven Hawley, editor of IPTV News, presented some interesting data purporting to show that by 2012, SaskTel will have 817,000 IPTV customers. Now, unless the potash industry REALLY takes off between now and 2012, we doubt that SaskTel will have over 2.5-times the number of TV customers than there are households in the province… MRG also predicts Bell will have 740,000 IPTV subs by then and Aliant 590,000. Since Bell has yet to launch and Aliant also serves the less than densely populated regions of the country, we have serious doubts about those figures, too.
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Overall, MRG says the number of global IPTV customers will reach 92 million by 2012, with 17 million in North America. Right now, the company figures there are 24 million IPTV subs, with 4.5 million in North America.
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One of the features IPTV companies are looking to leverage? Targeted advertising. Sound familiar?
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The hardest/most expensive part about IPTV is the individual in-home installs, say the providers, as Telus VP technology strategy Zouheir Mansourati confirms in another story on Cartt.ca. One potential solution is plastic optical fibre, said Lawrence Thorne, of Firecomms, which makes the product. It transmits one light, red, which is visible, is able to be cut with a knife and has a rather tight bend radius compared to glass fibre. It has a large core, so it’s easy to align, is immune to interference and immune to high voltage strikes. Plus it’s a proven technology and relatively inexpensive as it is used in auto manufacturing for communications within new vehicles. Firecomms knows this innately, as it’s a division of Mitsubishi, one of the world’s largest automakers.
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Look for more IPTV providers to do more branded content with specific advertisers and target market demos in mind. Kit Digital’s Dan Rosen showed off a Snickers-branded surfing channel for one such company, as an example. All the content was surfing, but overlaying it was a full Snickers ad look. This is an example of the ad-supported free-VOD content IPTV companies can offer customers, he said, adding there will always be room for subscription and other pay services.
With the pace of global change in the IP market in general, it will be difficult for IPTV providers to keep up, especially since, “the industry will be driven as much by what happens in Shanghai as in Chicago,” added Rosen.
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IPTV service providers are looking to broaden the scope of their “home pages” or “Channel Ones”, that place on their dial that is all-them and all-interactive. Knowing they need additional differentiation from satellite and cable, many operators during the week said they were looking to partner with web video companies to help deliver more, exclusive content to their customers via their televisions – and any other device they wish to use, for that matter. Local is also an important focus.
MTS TV’s Winnipeg On Demand and Verizon’s Channel One are good examples of this.
