For service providers, deciding which technologies are worthy of investment can, at times, be something of a gamble. Currently, a lot of communications service providers are betting that IPTV
and video will be winners.
That’s according to a new report out this week from Infonetics, in which the market research firm examined the activities of service providers in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific (APAC).
It’s hardly news that, for communications service providers, revenue from fixed-line telephony services is drying up. Customers are increasingly giving their money for such services to cable providers instead. Plus, Internet content providers add another segment of competition.
To boost their average revenue per user (ARPU), and to reduce churn, among other initiatives, many providers are now moving into the TV business, Infonetics said. This means rebranding to become something more than telephone companies.
It helps that such providers now have more options for delivering high-bandwidth, high revenue IPTV (
News -
Alert) and video services. A variety of access technologies — including DSL
, PON, cable HFC, Ethernet FTTH and WiMAX (
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Alert) — have become affordable options.
“IPTV is the application many service providers feel offers them the best opportunity to stem the loss of revenue from declining fixed access lines, and help them to more quickly recoup revenue from their ongoing fiber deployments,” said Infonetics analyst Jeff Heynen, summing up the situation.
Heynen added, however, that IPTV isn’t a shoe-in. Interoperability is probably the biggest hurdle to overcome.
“Various standards organizations are developing IPTV standards but all are in various stages of completion and adoption,” Heynen noted. “Until the majority of vendors agree to rally around a particular group of standards, interoperability will remain a critical problem for would-be IPTV providers.”
Aside from the problem of interoperability, providers also face challenges implementing interactive video features — a technically difficult task that’s part of the move away from a legacy linear model and toward interactive advertising, online gaming, etc., Infonetics said in its report.
Also, ensuring high quality of experience (QoE) for viewers of IPTV programming is critical from the get-go. If providers aren’t ready QoE-wise right out of the gate, likely they will not be able to differentiate their services successfully.
Despite these challenges, the transition to IPTV and interactive services is moving ahead quickly. Infontetics predicted that, for example, the number of service providers offering interactive advertising will increase from 20 percent now to 70 percent in 2009. Plus, 30 percent of respondents to a survey Infonetics referred to in its report said they have a hybrid solution set up — combining digital terrestrial (DTT) or satellite delivery of broadcast programming with multicast delivery of premium/video on demand (VoD) content.
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Mae Kowalke is senior editor for TMCnet, covering VoIP, CRM, call center and wireless technologies. To read more of Mae’s articles, please visit her columnist page. She also blogs for TMCnet here.
Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) | X |
| IPTV delivers a digital television service to subscribers
via the Internet Protocol over a broadband connection....more |
Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) | X |
| Frequency Division Multiplexing is used in wireline systems such as CATV-Community Antenna TeleVision and DSL-Digital Subscriber Line systems. This form of FDM is also called Broadband Multiplexing o...more |
Voice over IP (VoIP) | X |
| A real-time communications system that converts voice into digital packets containing media and signaling data that travel over networks using Internet Protocol....more |
Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
| IP stands for Internet Protocol, a data-networking protocol developed throughout the 1980s. It is the established standard protocol for transmitting and receiving data
in packets over the Internet. I...more |
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