Service Providers

2008 Year in Review: The talk of 2008

Dan O'Shea — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:11:34 -0500

When you look at how the IPTV sector progressed in 2008, there is a lot to like and just a little cause for concern. What's to like: Subscriber growth from one country to the next throughout the world; IPTV service providers winning customers away from cable TV firms; and, new features like whole-home DVR. What's to be concerned about: the inevitable slowing of subscriber growth; the effect of economic downturn; the likelihood that the expenses associated with expanding IPTV coverage aren't looking like a good idea to many telcos right now.

But IPTV itself is just one part of a thriving sector, what you might call the alternative TV/video network operator sector. I know-it's a mouthful, but what's happening in the market can't be pinned to a single technology or a single type or size of company. Different technologies are being used by all different types and sizes of players.

The five stories we have highlighted below might then be consider five of the biggest ongoing issues and trends we saw in that rich, complex sector during the year. They were not individual news events, but likely built from multiple events that occurred throughout the year that we expect to carry over into 2009. If the past year's theme was for the new TV carriers to establish a market foothold, the next year's theme will be to make it stick.

Happy Holidays, and here's to a successful 2009 for the upstart video providers.

-Dan

P.S. - FierceIPTV will be on publishing holiday until Jan. 6, 2009. We'll resume our weekly coverage of the IPTV industry then, so have a happy holiday and thanks for reading!

2008 Year in Review: Doors open to home networking

Dan O'Shea — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:19:16 -0500

Home networking is not a technology segment that is exclusive to IPTV. Service providers of all types are looking to leverage improving bandwidth service to the consumer home to a much greater extent than ever before. IPTV is one of the services whose potential application and value to the customer could be vastly increased through the creation of state-of-the-art home networks in which content is easily swapped, shared and copied between different networked devices. If the home theater was the must-have household entertainment item earlier this decade, the broadband home network could become the must-have for at least the next few years.

Numerous home networking announcements caught our attention in 2008. The sector is especially important to telcos looking to offset landline losses. They have caught onto the idea of becoming the IT department for the consumer home at a time when multiple new in-home wiring technologies are able to make the once-theoretical home network really possible. And though it is believed that most service providers will use multiple home network technologies, the International Telecommunications Union recently made great progress on an industry standard for home networking called G.hn.

2008 Year in Review: Targeted advertising nears prime time

Dan O'Shea — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:03:50 -0500

Way back in early 2007, a survey by Accenture and the Economist Intelligence Unit found that more than 46 percent of IPTV executives worldwide felt that targeted advertising could be a major source of IPTV revenue within the following year. That didn't happen by early 2008, and it still hasn't happened at the end of 2008-though, depending on your definition of "targeted advertising," you may feel differently. The general concept of targeted advertising has in fact traveled a long road in almost two years since that survey, a bumpy one with a few sharp curves. Many broadband service providers have delayed or put off tests of targeted ad technology, due to the controversy the somewhat intrusive technology generated.

However, many people in the TV sector feel that telco TV players may have a chance to roll out targeted advertising in a much more consumer-friendly way. In 2008, the ad insertion solutions that telcos will need to advance their ad capabilities toward the targeted advertising model came a long way. The survey respondents back in early 2007 were right about one thing: Targeted advertising can be a major source of revenue. We're not there yet, but a little bit closer.

Spotlight: MI-Connection vs. Ma Bell

Dan O'Shea — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:41:57 -0500

AT&T announced this week that it will begin offering its U-verse IPTV service in the Charlotte, N.C. area, which may sound like just another in a long list of market launches. However, Davidson, N.C.'s DavidsonNews.net offers a detailed local view of the potential competitive battle developing between AT&T and MI-Connection, a cable TV and Internet provider serving 16,000 customers, and operated by the towns of Mooresville and Davidson. The municipalities bought the former Adelphia system last year from Time Warner Cable.

AT&T said last year it would invest $350 million to upgrade its North Carolina network. Meanwhile, Davidson and Mooresville have initiated a $22.5 million upgrade to their network, and also plan to offer voice next year to compete against AT&T and other service providers. Can the local cable venture contend with U-Verse TV features like Total Home DVR? Or will customer loyalty to the local hero keep AT&T IPTV success to a minimum in these markets?

For more:
- DavidsonNews.net has this story

Infonetics: Q2 hurt IPTV, SDV spending

Dan O'Shea — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 16:15:36 -0500

Infonetics Research announced new numbers for the IPTV and switched digital video market that are not going to make service providers or vendors engaged in the North America market feel very good. Infonetics said the IPTV and SDV equipment market "declined sharply" in the second quarter of this year, largely due to declines in IPTV and SDV subscriber additions by service providers in North America and other regions during that particular quarter.

Still, service providers specifically in Asia, Europe, and Latin America continue to invest in video-related gear at a healthy pace. Other findings from Infonetics included the fact that North America's share of the overall IPTV and SDV equipment markets was down from 47 percent to 38 percent between the first quarter and the second quarter. Also, the IPTV set-top box market was down 10 percent, but the IP video encoder market was up 8 percent

Also notable: Infonetics said IPTV service activation times "are ranging from days to weeks, sending through the roof the cost to pass homes and turn up subscribers, prompting IPTV operators to push harder for well-defined interoperability standards."

For more:
- Here's the Infonetics Research press release

ATIS IPTV effort produces new standard

Dan O'Shea — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 09:44:34 -0400

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions has unveiled the latest standard to emerge from the ATIS IPTV Interoperability Forum. That standard, loquaciously titled, "Network Attachment and Initialization of Devices and Client Discovery of IPTV Services" (ATIS-0800017), specifies fundamental steps for how consumer devices are prepared to receive and carry IPTV services.

Those fundamentals, according to an ATIS press release, begin with "initialization and attachment phases for the Delivery (home) Network Gateway (DNG) and the IPTV Terminal Function (ITF), which includes the set top box. Comprehensively, it covers network attachment, service provider discovery, service provider attachment and services discovery procedures." These processes essentially give the consumer's system greater awareness of service provider, service and connection options, with the long-term goal of enabling interoperability and simplifying the consumer's IPTV experience, ATIS said.

The group soon expects to specify how to access linear TV services through an IP managed service. The ATIS 0800017 standard is available through the ATIS Document Center.

For more:
- see this ATIS press release

Alcatel-Lucent latest to enable targeted advertising

Dan O'Shea — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:40:22 -0400

Microsoft and BigBand Networks both recently announced solutions to enable service providers to support targeted advertising for IPTV offerings, and now, Alcatel-Lucent has announced a new system looking to do the same. Though targeted advertising has gotten a bad rap from the controversy related to the NebuAd platform and others, it remains very important to service providers' future revenue prospects.

Newer concepts for enabling targeted advertising are focused more on aggregating general information on demographics an anonymous usage profiles of customers who have opted in to such programs, rather than specific personal information on users who haven't been given a choice in the matter. Alcatel-Lucent's solution is based on a new blade element for its 7450 Ethernet services switch.

For more:
- see this story at Telephony

AT&T pushes MPEG-4 to full HD potential

Dan O'Shea — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:43:06 -0400

AT&T did not pursue the same fiber-to-the-home IPTV plans that some others carriers have relied on, but John Donovan, the telco's CTO, said at a conference last week that increasingly efficient MPEG-4 compression will help AT&T continue to grow its high-definition channel line-up.

Donovan said MPEG-4 video compression for the company's U-verse TV service will improve to around 5 Mbps next year from its present rate of about 6 Mbps to 8 Mbps. That efficiency gain also will help AT&T support more simultaneous streams with its new whole-home DVR service in use--three live streams and four recorded streams.

MPEG-4 equipment was slow to come to market, but the protocol now can give IPTV service providers some help against their cable TV competitors, who mostly use MPEG-2 compression.

For more:
- read this coverage at Multichannel News

Kangaroo has BT, others hopping mad

Dan O'Shea — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 09:15:44 -0400

U.K. telco giant BT became the latest company to express its concern over Kangaroo, the video-on-demand joint venture created by the BBC Worldwide, ITV and the U.K.'s Channel 4. What raised the ire of BT and several video service providers and broadcasters was Kangaroo's initial plan to hold exclusive rights to content commissioned by its shareholding firms, which critics claim would give the new company too much control over the developing video-on-demand market.

Kangaroo pulled back on those plans, and The Financial Times reported that Kangaroo, "is now likely to allow other online services to show catch-up TV, the most popular shows for on-demand viewing," and would retain syndication rights for 30 days after transmission. However, critics want assurances all content will be priced and available on a fair basis.

BT, according to C21 Media.net, fears that Kangaroo will adversely affect competition. The telco is in an especially vulnerable position because, with 280,000 customers, its IPTV service is still somewhat small. Also, BT already is facing a growing competitive threat from the likes of France Telecom's Orange and O2, which is planning to grow a TV customer base in the U.K. market.

For more:
- see this coverage at The Financial Times
- read this report at C21 Media.net

NCTC should accept telcos

Dan O'Shea — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:25:08 -0400

The National Cable Television Cooperative is expected to begin accepting new service provider members in January 2009, after putting a moratorium on new members three years ago. The NCTC reportedly closed its doors to new members because of the possibility that telcos just starting out in the TV business would want to join to gain access to the programming deals the NCTC negotiated with the content industry on behalf of its members. Because those telcos represented a competitive threat to the traditional NCTC membership, the agency instead decided to take some time to review its membership policies.

The moratorium on new members will be lifted in a few months, but the NCTC is not saying yet what its policy will be for accepting new members who are telco IPTV providers. Some of the small telcos who would have benefited from NCTC membership in the past have since been able to benefit from IP Prime, the content program devised by the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative and SES Americom. So, perhaps not as many telcos would be interested in the NCTC now.

However, if the NCTC's goal is to get the best possible content deals for its member companies, they should not only open membership to telcos, but should actively woo them. The greater scale that could be achieved by the NCTC would allow them to get better deals, while also making the association a more relevant agency at a time when cable TV firms and telcos are very much in the same businesses. The result will be that small service providers of all kinds will be able to provide the content their customers want without having to pay too much for that opportunity. The competitive jealousies and squabbles that might arise from the situation are best left for the market to resolve, rather than a closed door.

-Dan

For more:
- see this story at Telephony

Related articles:
IP Prime went live about one year ago

HomePNA claims top N.A. telcos

Dan O'Shea — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:26:05 -0400

Canadian telco Telus recently became the latest North American telco to adopt HPNA 3.1 technology for home networking, and with that commitment, four of the five largest telcos in North America have chosen the 3.1 standard, according to the HomePNA Alliance.

Steve Rago, principal analyst at iSuppli Corporation, said that more service providers in North America now use HPNA, capable of 320 Mbps bandwidth, for home networking than other coaxial cable home networking solutions. Still, industry observers have noted in the past that carriers are likely to continue to use a variety of home network technologies, depending on what different deployment cases require.

For more:
- see this story at IPTV News

Reliance eyes IPTV launch this year

Dan O'Shea — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:43:12 -0400

Reliance Communications reiterated that it is planning to launch IPTV service before the end of 2008, according to a statement by company president Mahesh Prasad in The Economic Times of India. As early as January 2007, Reliance had said that it was targeting a launch before the end of this year, and Prasad's comments suggested that the service provider is starting to see the demand for which it was hoping. Reliance announced an IPTV-related partnership with Microsoft late last year, but it seems to have been taking its time while other service providers in India began their own TV rollouts.

For more:
- read this story at The Economic Times

Related articles:
Reliance said 18 months ago it would launch by the end of 2008. Reliance report
India--and the rest of Asia--has been seen as the next IPTV hotbed. India report

Verizon, Dish lead HD channel charge

Dan O'Shea — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:37:30 -0400

TV providers continue to try to out-do one another in the area of high-definition channel line-ups, and Multichannel News reports that Dish Network and Verizon Communications are leading the way. Both service providers are targeting 150 HD channels by the end of this year. Dish last month launched a new satellite giving its capacity to reach 150 channels, and it recently launched its TurboHD service. DirecTV also is moving to 130 HD channels later this month.

For more:
- ready this story at Multichannel News

Related articles:
HDTV programming can strain network bandwidth. HDTV report
HDTV rollouts by small telco were affected by a software issue. HDTV report

TiVo, Amazon tackle TV/Web integration

Dan O'Shea — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:18:24 -0400

IPTV service providers, cable TV companies and many different kinds of set-top device and online companies are trying to figure out how to merge online video and TV content and viewing practices, and TiVo and Amazon separately announced offerings this week that take the evolution a little further. TiVo is now offering YouTube through newer TiVO hardware, and Amazon announced plans for a new online video-on-demand store.

The future evolution of set-top boxes like TiVo DVRs has been in question, but TiVo is looking to cement its place on the TV stand by tackling the online video/TV integration with a large, known player while some IPTV service providers are still approaching the integration tentatively. Meanwhile, Amazon possibly learned a few things from its unloved Unbox venture about how to more efficiently make movies and TV content available online. These moves bear watching for any TV service provider feeling pressure to incorporate online content, while wondering how such ventures from giant online retailers and well-known device companies could affect their bottom lines.

For more:
- see this post about TiVo at Wired News Blogs
- read this story about Amazon at The New York Times

Related article:
Online TV growth could affect the success of IPTV. Online TV report

Spotlight: Service providers fear OTT's advertising impact

Dan O'Shea — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:55:48 -0400

At the same time that IPTV carriers and other video service providers are looking at devices and methods to help them incorporate and manage over-the-top (OTT) online video as part of their TV offerings, they are acknowledging OTT could have a devastating impact on current advertising models.

Light Reading's Contentinople reports that Terry Denson, Verizon's vice president of programming and marketing for FiOS TV, said at the Advertising 2.0 conference last week that service providers need to "preserve the integrity of network-based distribution" of content. Denson added, "We need to protect ourselves from devices, over-the-top, and all kinds of ancillary content consumption, which can only serve to erode our import as being the key delivery option in the living room."

How to do that at the same time service providers are encouraging the integration of a multitude of content sources remains to be seen, and neither Verizon nor other service providers appear to have an answer handy. As in the classic film "King Kong" (not the 1970s version, which now only reminds us of the World Trade Center), service providers are trying to capture a monster and put it on display, but their puny chains may not be able to contain it. Check out this post at Contentinople.

Related articles:
Contextual ads, an IPTV money maker IPTV ad report
Adap.tv ups online ad game Adap.tv report