Television 2.0 cometh

Despite the challenges in bringing IPTV into the mainstream, interest is booming. Howard Greenfield explains why everyone's so excited about this new medium.

As I wrote in last month's column, with a new technology such as IPTV everyone's a novice. We're all figuring things out, inventing a new way to do media as we go. The Zen of it is that beginners' minds benefit from open, unlimited creativity and choices for what comes next.

The last month alone has held many new developments in this area, inching us toward that pervasive future. We now have IP video encoders that can handle 36 MPEG-2 channels, full 'quadruple play' offerings (bundled telephone, TV, internet and wireless) from world-leading telco PCCW in Hong Kong (800,000 subscribers on their IPTV platform), and Tiscali has nearly doubled its subscribership over the last quarter.

To nail down some of the basics and peer out beyond the misty horizon that is IPTV, I turn to Wes Simpson, my trusted co-author of IPTV & Internet Video (Focal Press / Elsevier, 2007):

Greenfield: Wes, what is IPTV?
Simpson: IPTV is very similar to other television delivery services such as cable television and satellite, particularly because set-top boxes are used to deliver continuous channels of content to traditional televisions. In contrast, internet video uses PCs and their associated displays to deliver discrete video programs to users at their request. Of course there are a number of services and devices that are blurring the lines between these two categories but that's half the fun of working in this industry.

Is IPTV about the hardware, the software or the content?
IPTV is really about software and system integration. All of the hardware building blocks are well established and content is virtually identical between the various distribution methods. The software required to deliver and manage a user-controllable stream for each viewer is new technology that forms the heart of an IPTV system.

So what then are the building blocks of this 'new technology'?
There are a number of IPTV components that need to work seamlessly together, including content processors, set-top boxes and video-on-demand servers. Integrating components like these and the DSLAM (digital subscriber line access multiplexer - which generates the DSL signals and places them onto the pair of copper wires, or local loop, leading to each home) with brand new middleware is a significant engineering challenge.

What is the biggest current technical obstacle to deploying competitive IPTV?
The biggest technical obstacle is the scalability of the middleware - ensuring the systems are able to handle the loads of millions of viewers simultaneously changing channels and requesting content. The biggest competitive challenge is the need to drive the per-household cost of installation down to the point where it is cost-effective to deploy to millions of households.

Why is middleware so important?
Middleware is responsible for much of the activity inside an IPTV system, including programme guides, billing, encryption, subscriber authorisation and channel changing. Without middleware, IPTV would be a lifeless collection of hardware with no way for viewers to get access to the content they want.

When will these challenges be overcome?
These challenges are being actively addressed today by every member of the vendor and provider community but IPTV systems are notoriously hard to simulate in the lab, due to their complexity and the capricious nature of viewers. We probably won't know the scalability questions have been answered until a few multimillion-viewer households successfully make it through the World Cup or Super Bowl Sunday without a system meltdown. With any luck, that should happen within the next couple of years.

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Still despite all this complexity, interest in IPTV and internet video is booming. Why is this? Here's how Wes and I answer that question in our recent book IPTV & Internet Video. We believe it boils down to five basic arguments:

• Because broadband IP networks reach so many households in developed countries, video service providers can use these networks to launch video services without having to build their own networks.
• IP can simplify the task of launching new video services, such as interactive programming, video on demand and targeted, viewer-specific advertising.
• The cost of IP networking continues to decline due to the massive volume of equipment produced each year and the existence of worldwide standards.
• IP networks can be found in every country in the world, and the number of users with high-speed internet connections continues to grow at a rapid pace.
• IP is a perfect technology for a large number of applications including data transactions for email or banking, local area networking, file sharing, web surfing etc.

All these indicators point to one thing: it's time to start having fun blurring the lines between IPTV and internet video. I say we call it television 2.0.

Howard Greenfield is a digital media industry strategist, columnist and co-author of IPTV & Internet Video (Focal Press/ Elsevier, 2007). He is president of Go Associates, a leading consultancy that develops and implements high-tech product marketing and global business development strategies. Howard has held senior management and consulting positions with Apple, BT, Informix Software, Sun Microsystems and other world technology leaders. He is the creator and former manager of Sun's first Media Lab and completed his graduate studies at Stanford University. He can be reached at howard@go-associates.com.