September is IPTV Month

By Tsahi Levent-Levi

Categories: Technology

September 1st, 2008

For those of you who have been following me for a while, you might already have noticed that I tend to switch between different target markets for the technologies I write about - they can be mobile handsets, enterprise solutions, developers of servers, etc.

I have decided that September is a good time (as any) to give some (living) room for IPTV in this blog.

To start with, I’d like to state my views on things here, and they are not different than what I already said about Unified Communications: IPTV is no revolution at this point in time. It is much of the same.

Televisions today have an alarmingly large number of channels. To control them providers offer an electronic programming guides (EPG), which can be accessed by consumers to get information about every program available using the remote. None of it is done in pure IPTV form - it only requires middleware that is located on your set-top box at home, which communicates with the operator’s head-end.

When you check what is going on in the IPTV domain, it will usually be one of the following:

• High Definition - nice, but it’s the TV, all over again, only with better resolution.
• Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) - been there, done that. What’s the point? Only adding some minor features to it?
• Video On Demand (VOD) - nice, but it is not enough for me to switch to IPTV (and it is already available through existing TV providers).
• Personal Video Recorder (PVR) or Time Shifting - you can achieve this by merging the EPG with a large hard drive in the set-top box or TV. Again - no added value for having IPTV

So as you can see, these features are simply not enough for consumers to take the leap on to IPTV. As we stream an all-IP network to our homes, and use it not only for the internet but also for our phone systems and television, there’s a lot more we can do in IPTV.

I’ll try to use the time I have this month to go over what I feel can make IPTV different - so stay tuned, we’ll be right back after this commercial.