There’s been a fair amount of online chatter about the possibilities offered by IPTV. I work in the Telecommunications industry and I can affirm the large-scale interest that Telco providers have in this technology. That said, I wonder if the discussion is a little off-focus.
First, a little bit of definition.
IPTV is often confused with Internet TV. The distinction (from my perspective) is really that Internet TV is a more demand-oriented, ala carte’ group of offerings that includes content from potentially many sources (think YouTube, Hulu, your kid-sister’s teenage daughter, etc), delivered across the public Internet and most frequently accessed by a personal computer. A lot of times, it can also be viewed on your TV’s by way of a computer-to-TV connection or some specialized kind of set-top box. It can also be sourced by some aggregator of content so that it appears to be a unified set of services or it could be up to the user. The primary discussion here is more about the “other” IPTV. To me IPTV really more often refers to video service offered by a provider such as your cable or telephone company, in which:
- The content is not specifically delivered across the public Internet.
- The content is controlled by the provider, often this includes some assurance of better quality.
- The content is packaged by the provider, frequently much like traditional cable television’s different service tiers.
- The content tends to be more “traditional” (network providers like CBS, ESPN, etc.)
- Content is television-centric.
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Now I realize that these points aren’t definitive nor are they always all constituents of a given offering. Still, the main difference is that today, “IPTV” tends to look more like what you’re used to from cable companies. Note too that in both the “Internet TV” and “IPTV” cases, content is delivered using TCP/IP in some fashion. That much is certainly common. Still, it’s also interesting to note that when you hear the term “IPTV”, it’s frequently in the context of video services offered by your phone company (Verizon’s FIOS excluded, but that’s another topic). The reason for this is fodder for another post.
So back to my title question: “Who cares about IPTV”? I mentioned that the discussion about IPTV is kind of missing the point. Why? Mainly because I think for the most part that folks don’t really care how their content is delivered. Why does it matter to them whether their video comes in on a coax cable or a twisted pair of wires? Do people care if the delivery protocols are TCP/IP or Yiddish? I don’t think so. It’s very similar to how I feel about VoIP. To a subscriber, what does it matter if their voice is going out in packetized form?
What I believe folks *do* care about is:
- Getting the content they care about
- The quality of that content
- The cost of that content
- The reliability of that content
- What they can do with that content (DVR, content portability, etc.)
If it’s true that people don’t fundamentally care about how their services are delivered, isn’t it time to focus the discussion of next-generation video services around the points above, and more? What can be delivered to consumers that they haven’t been able to get traditionally and will those features be interesting enough to for them to pay for? Should we be thinking about these services strictly in terms of entertainment, or should we begin to see the video interface as being useful for more? Remember “convergence? Think things like Apple’s “Apple TV”, a device that is evolving into a tool for more than simple video viewing. Do people want that kind of integration?
I’d love it if someone would come out with something that I can say “I really gotta have that”, but it hasn’t happened yet. I have Verizon FIOS and while it’s an excellent service, I still simply think of it as cable TV. Maybe that’s how I should think about it and give up on expecting more. (One point that has confused me since I got the FIOS video service: When you get FIOS data, your phone service is delivered using the FIOS optical transport. This implies that if you have that and the FIOS TV service, the video part could be integrated with the telephone part to offer you things like on-screen caller ID. Geez, my sister and brother-in-law have that with their cable service. Why can’t FIOS subscribers? For that matter, couldn’t that info be used to create smart answering systems that can be gotten to from your TV, PC, Internet mobile, etc.?)
So, for now I don’t have a lot of interest in “IPTV” from a consumer perspective, because I don’t think it matters much. I certainly do from a business and technical direction, but that doesn’t help susbscribers. I’ll have more to say on the subject in the next post.