Communications and Technology Industry Research

IPTV (News - Alert) market is changing rapidly with operators starting to offer highly personalized and portable on-demand viewing experience to sign up more customers for their service, according to a latest survey by Infonetics Research (News - Alert).

Almost every operator is offering just the same service like the other, but the analyst firm believes there is a growing need to adopt latest technology to remain successful in an increasingly cutthroat market.

By the end of 2012, nearly 63 percent of IPTV service providers will have been offering multi-screen viewing experience on PCs, tablets, and smartphones, and about half of them may begin to offer interactive advertising, according to the report.

That means, multi-screen viewing, interactive applications and social networking are some of the services expected to be implemented over the next year.

The report opines widgets will become widely-deployed applications by next year.

While telco operators look to be more innovative with IP video and satellite, cable operators are leveraging broadband infrastructure to offer similar services, the research firm noted in its report.

The report titled ‘ IPTV Services Deployment Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey’ asks IPTV operators to watch the competition closely to determine the direction of the market.

Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter are the most popular social networking sites for IPTV consumers, so operators are scrambling to add the application to their service. So far, only 26 percent of operators are offering social networking applications, but this figure is likely to rise to 41 percent next year, the report said.

“Despite representing only a small portion of pay-TV market, IPTV services has had a significant impact on the market, forcing change across the entire ecosystem of video delivery,” says Teresa Mastrangelo, directing analyst for video at Infonetics Research.