IPTV Commentary Archive
:: IPTV Commentary Archive ::
Net ushers in experiential TV
By: By Maribel D. Lopez
The past five years have presented major changes in the TV industry such as extensive, free video-on-demand catalogs and time-shifting with digital video recorders...
Meeting the market
By: By Carol Wilson
Inside the telecom industry, we tend to focus on big technology trends and innovations that ultimately have little relevance in the consumer or business worlds...
Shoe on the other foot
By: By Carol Wilson
When the cable companies decided to get into VoIP, they didn’t go into the marketplace touting the new technology they’d discovered and trying to attract new customers that way. Instead, they called it “digital phone service” and focused on its low cost, a long list of features and reliability. The approach paid off...
The bandwidth requirement conundrum
By: By Geoff Burke, Calix
Bandwidth prognostications today focus on only the stream side of the equation -- adding up the total bandwidth requirements of all streams concurrently supported by the multi-service experience delivered. What these prognosticators forget, however, is that files are another matter...
Content still clueless on DVR
By: By Jonathan Blum
For all the sympathy content producers have tried to elicit it's still remarkable to see how little they respect the consumer’s time, money and intelligence. Get this: We no longer own the pay-per-view movies we pay for and record on our digital video recorders...
Knight Rider, ad writer
By: By Ed Gubbins
The latest “Battle for the American Couch Potato” report reiterates in its conclusions the same dire warning that’s been rung out in recent years regarding the future of video advertising: It’s got to get sneakier, it’s got to blur the line between advertising and programming, it’s got to insinuate itself ever more intimately into video content so that we can’t fast-forward through commercials anymore...
IPTV's DVR strategy is flawed
By: By Danny Briere
IPTV is reaching the mainstream, but there's still a big gap between what providers are offering and what consumers really want. A great example is the...
The consumer view
By: By Carol Wilson
Whether you invent new technology, deploy new technology or just write about it, like me, it's hard not to get caught up in the newness of it...
Net neutrality: Here we go again
By: By Carol Wilson
Congress is once again threatening to implement Net neutrality in order to prevent service providers from offering tiered content distributions services...
Survival of the fittest -- Carriers need partners not vendors
By: By Robert W. Pullen, Tellabs
Providers need more today than just high-quality infrastructure. In today’s climate of “what have you done for me lately,” the litmus test for choosing an infrastructure vendor is not only equipment, but also services that deliver quantifiable benefits to the top and bottom lines...
Converging on an opportunity
By: By Paul Mankiewich, Alcatel-Lucent
As an industry, we see signs that the convergence of the Web, wireline and wireless networks is well underway. The next logical step is the delivery of content to all three screens – TV, PC and mobile device. What will this mean for the people who will use the services?...
Clueless on IPTV quality?
By: By Carol Wilson
Service providers used to build quality networks for voice services. Then they began offering data and needed to guarantee a quality of service for that data. Now, as they offer video, they need to guarantee a quality of experience for the video consumer...
Video compensates for broadband declines at AT&T and Verizon
By: By Teresa Mastrangelo, Broadbandtrends.com
At this stage, it is hard to escape news about a weakening economy in the United States. However, judging by the earnings calls from both AT&T and Verizon, everything is great. So why are they so confident when all the signs point in a different direction? ...
No tough times for telecom?
By: By Carol Wilson
It seems inevitable that the slowing U.S. economy will begin to spill over onto the sales of the voice, video, data and wireless bundles that telecom service providers are now peddling. Or it did to me. But that’s not necessarily the case, according to some of the industry analysts I polled for this column...
Video's future becomes clearer
By: By Jonathan Hurd
Continued improvements in video display technology highlighted the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show. Several manufacturers showed 100-plus-inch displays,...
Can home control services be the next wave for telcos?
By: By Danny Briere
Telcos still have a long ways to go to perfect their triple/quadruple play services. IPTV is improving, but it’s still not there. And the long talked about IMS-driven integration of content across three (or more) screens isn’t yet a reality. OK – so all of these things need to be progressed. Work remains to be done...
Video: Becoming increasingly clear
By: By Jonathan Hurd
Continued improvements in video display technology highlighted the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Several manufacturers showed 100+-inch displays, with Panasonic’s 150-inch prototype (more than 6 feet high and almost 11 feet wide) winning the prize...
Hopeful signs on the cost vs. consumption curve
By: By Ed Gubbins
Telecom carriers have struggled for years with contradictions between their cost structure and their revenue streams. Life would be easier for carriers if their customers would pay more according to what they consume, though how could they ever be convinced to do that?...
Anybody game?
By: By Carol Wilson
A year after Microsoft first said it would integrate its IPTV platform and its Xbox 360 Live game system, the first of the software giant's customers -- BT -- has announced it will sell the game consoles, which double as IPTV set-tops boxes...
Standards, step one
By: By Carol Wilson
The announcement this week of the first set of IPTV standards from the International Telecommunications Union is certainly welcome, but many within the IPTV segment see this is the first of what will be many steps in the process of standardizing IPTV...
Squeezable services
By: By Ed Gubbins
The term couch potato is more than just a cute nickname for television consumers. Though we talk a lot about how to win over those couch potatoes, we too often forget what the term really means: lazy, shiftless people...
What is IPTV?
By: By Ken Pyle, President of Viodi LLC
Given the relatively high profile of IPTV in the telecommunications industry, it may seem strange to ask such a fundamental question...
How much bandwidth to the home is enough?
By: By Rich Karpinski
Of course, that's the million-dollar question as service providers, led by AT&T and Verizon, experiment and invest to find the right amount of fiber -- at the right price -- to deliver services to the home...
Head to head on IPTV
By: By Carol Wilson
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 ...
Our IPTV wish list's Top 10
By: By Danny Briere
Operators offering IPTV are going to find it increasingly hard to convince users that pretty TV guides and 10,000 video-on-demand titles are enough to switch from cable and satellite offerings...
