Maybe the IPTV industry is starting to mature, as some of the telcos are starting to cycle through their first generation of equipment for new and improved offerings from suppliers. This echoed comments made by Frank Gini of ETI Software a few weeks back at the IPTV 2007 show. This thought was triggered by a comment made by Scott Barber, President of SureWest Broadband, at CalCom’s Annual Meeting in Santa Barbara. Barber indicated that SureWest has selected WideVine as their new encryption vendor.
Barber suggested that SureWest is continually re-evaluating many of the elements in their IPTV network. He explained that this is the natural progression of technology and that products available today were nascent or slideware a few years ago. He stated the triggers for changing encryption suppliers were the need for PVR support and the desire to have a soft decryption client in the set-top. He indicated that achieving 10 Mb/s over copper is difficult, even very good plant, and that it is like finding, “Mr. Good Pair.”
Allan Shearer of Ponderosa Telephone moderated a panel that consisted of Mitch Drake from Kerman Telephone and Dan Richardson of Calaveras Telephone. These companies are much smaller than SureWest and have been studying how best to create an IPTV product. Richardson of Calaveras Telephone explained how they put out an RFP for an IPTV solution in March 2005, with the thought that MPEG-4 was just around the corner. They spent 2006 testing and breaking equipment. Two years later and they still don’t have a solution.
NRTC is promising General Availability by the end of April. They have on order of 263 channels line up, with the notable exception being HBO. They are now offering channel packages, including one that provides12 channels plus off-air and an expanded basic of 94 video channels plus 56 audio channels. The premium channels (Showtime, Starz…) will include all of the variations of the linear channels, plus subscription VOD of those channels. Local content, VOD and Ad insertion are part of their roadmap.
Advertisers are the true kings of content. Steve Kline of Zhone Technologies made that astute observation in his presentation regarding the challenges and opportunities associated with IPTV deployment. Kline indicated that there are 185 revenue deployments serving 380+ communities and 250k homes with over 1.5 M homes passed by IPTV in the U.S. He fears that the early telco adopters will be secondary customers that nobody cares about anymore, because other markets are growing much faster than the U.S.
