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IPTV - To Be Or Not To Be?The recent NXTcomm (News - Alert) show in Chicago (2007) was brimming with IPTV equipment and demos. Perhaps most telling of all was the fact that many of the equipment vendors (notably Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert)) concentrated on IPTV applications as opposed to just showing their wares. Of course, there was a great deal of hardware to be seen, also. The availability of MPEG-4 set-top boxes was one piece of big news. Another major item of interest was the announcement that Verizon (News - Alert) Business (old MCI) was accelerating its network buildup by adding optical cross-connects and going to a full deployment of ROADMs earlier than planned. The main driver for the network additions was the carriage of Verizon’s FiOS (News - Alert) video traffic. All of this activity should indicate that IPTV is here to stay. Then how can we have an IPTV report with the somewhat negative title of "IPTV To Be or Not to Be?" The answer is in the details of the differences of how video is being implemented by the two major RBOCs. One (AT&T (News - Alert)) is using a pure IPTV approach, while what Verizon is doing is hardly recognizable as IPTV. To date Verizon is obviously the most successful. This report will look very closely at future drivers for residential video development and how this difference is likely to be played out IPTV To Be or Not to Be? The RBOCs are making great progress in becoming creditable players in video delivery. Verizon has just announced the connection of its 500,000th FiOS video customer. While this is a long way from the top-tier cable companies (with around 24,000,000 subscribers), it is still a remarkable accomplishment in about a year and a half. This half-million subscribers would put Verizon on the top ten list of cable companies! In addition, Verizon is adding FiOS video customers at the rate of slightly over 50,000 a month. For more information please visit : http://www.aarkstore.com/reports/IPTV-To-Be-Or-Not-To-Be--1986.html As a community-building service, TMCnet allows user submitted content which is not always proofed by TMCnet editors. If you feel this entry is of inferior quality or wish to report it for some reason, please forward the URL to "webedit [AT] tmcnet [DOT] com" with your comments. |