It seems easy to call the slowdown of IPTV deployments with the economic downturn now 
under way. Could we go further and call the death of mass adoption IPTV? By death, I mean a delay of a decade or more, and by mass adoption I mean a service that can easily provide for 4 screens of simultaneous and different content, with at least one HD service. What are the drivers for this?
- Loss of capital investment in new networks for the next five years at least, BT being just the first to say it.
- Loss of advertising revenue due to the downturn, not being able to fund the supply of new services.
- Loss of advertising revenue due to changes in viewing models with free/low cost on-demand content.
- Customer fatigue for new incompatible technologies – all those digital TVs that do not support the MPEG4 based future services, immediately after replacing their TVs over the last few years. Customers expect to keep the TV for five years at least.
- Customer focus away from premium subscription services towards basic low cost services, reducing direct revenues during the downturn.
- Bandwidth limits due to contention and operator management coming into play to make IP based content harder to consume without the new network investments – Virgin Media being the one to have passed over an IPTV deployment as long ago as last year.
Remember, I am not talking about the early adopters but I am talking about the ordinary consumer who thinks they have HDTV because they have a nice flat panel rather than any service change, and who still plugs the terrestrial aerial cable into the TV even though they have a DSAT service providing all the channels and are connected by SCART or even HDMI. This is the majority of consumers.
Do you agree or disagree?
Or do we actually have a renaissance in IPTV as a way for consumers to get hold of lower cost content, user generated content, all of which is not controlled by their local pipe owner and not necessarily in real time – making use of download slowtime to get around network performance restrictions and making use of the increased ownership of network connected personal devices like netbooks, laptops and iPhones? This renaissance however taking place away from the traditional gatekeepers, and making use of devices not controlled by the pipe owner? However all of this would have to become easier for the ordinary consumer to configure and use.
I would love your own thoughts on the matter.
