Last week provided a rare opportunity to see the two largest U.S. telcos lifting the veil on IPTV -- albeit in two very different venues.

Peter Hill, vice president of voice and converged services at AT&T, took the stage of a large theater in Atlanta to tell a widely scattered audience of a few hundred TelcoTV attendees some of what AT&T is doing in its IPTV labs.

Two days later, in a much more intimate Customer Presentation Lab at its Basking Ridge, N.J., headquarters (once, ironically, an AT&T building) a team of Verizon technologists, led by CTO Mark Wegleitner, provided a much smaller (and more closely grouped) media audience with a similar look behind the curtain.

Hill’s job was much tougher -- he had to try to entertain an audience as well as present applications in a location not necessarily best designed for that. Even so, I was disappointed that one of the first things he talked about was caller ID on the television -- something smaller IPTV providers have been offering for a couple of years now.

Both companies stressed the interactivity of an IP-based service and the desire to make it easy for consumers to use new applications. They both are also stressing integration of wireless services with their video offerings.

If there is a concern about what the two companies showed off, it is that technology -- which is what both were stressing -- doesn’t seem to be the major issue. The business case for advanced advertising and the potential privacy concerns for things such as targeted ads and services, which track where people are based on GPS listings and Google Maps, are the real stumbling blocks.

The other issue that neither company can get around is whether they are willing to open up their systems for outside developers. Traditionally, this has not been a strong point of the telco industry, and based on what I saw last week, it still isn’t.

If AT&T and Verizon are able to deliver on the applications they previewed last week, they could well improve their competitive status versus cable and satellite video providers. They have a real chance to do much more than that, and from what I saw, they have the technology to do it as well. Whether all this actually happens is yet to be seen.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.