The magazine Entertainment Weekly recently published a graphic piece that speculated on what the home entertainment experience might be like in the future. According to the experts EW quizzed, we'll all have couches that remember the body types of the people that sit in them frequently and will automatically adjust for the comfort of whomever happens to plop down. That sounds like something that will make us all more willing captives of our TV sets. But in EW's version of the future of home entertainment, there is no TV, just an “entertainment cube,” a voice-activated box residing on the ceiling that will project any piece of entertainment asked of it directly onto the living room wall.

That view probably seems a little far-fetched to the telecom companies that are building the first IPTV systems. Entertainment cubes aren't exactly part of anyone's current plans. However, IPTV is heading in the same general direction, prepared to take the home entertainment and TV viewing experience to a whole new level.

In fact, ceiling-dwelling cube devices aside, it's possible that many years from now, no one will even remember what TVs looked like, or where we kept them, in the first decade of the 21st century. That's because, thanks to IPTV systems and software, there will be so many networked devices capable of displaying, storing and sharing TV content that the whole concept of the TV as a physical piece of heavy hardware sitting in the living room will seem quaint — as quaint as a giant, immobile Philco seems to us now.

How TV service is delivered and even what we understand the term “TV” to mean is undergoing a change that will only intensify in the months and immediate years to come. There are two separate but parallel technology trends fueling that change. One is the emergence and evolution of IPTV, the customizable, convergent stream of TV content and related services that is and will be coming into households around the world, courtesy of IP-enabled broadband networks.

These networks primarily will be delivered by telcos reinventing themselves for an age in which content is king, and traditional one-dimensional voice services are commoditized also-rans.

The other trend is the emergence of mobile TV, which, in its current form, is based on technology that allows users to download and stream TV channels — or in the case of mobisodes, to download content specifically designed and developed for mobile devices and screen sizes. Some form of mobile TV is readily available today from many mobile carriers.

The mobile TV model continues to undergo technological evolution, however. It increasingly may adapt to a broadcast model, with companies such as Aloha Partners, Crown Castle and Qualcomm and planning to build auxiliary broadcast networks dedicated to the transmission of TV and other video content to mobile devices. Like IPTV for telcos, mobile TV is seen as a new revenue generator for mobile carriers at a time when average revenue per user is shrinking and the value of voice minutes is at an all-time low.

Both of these technology trends change the way customers use devices — the TV and the mobile phone, respectively — and alter the way that they can relate to the content they receive over these devices. Fundamentally, IPTV changes the relationship that users have to their TVs and their TV viewing routines by bringing video-on-demand into the mix.

“It's all about getting TV on your own terms,” said Ed Graczyk, director of marketing and communications for the Microsoft TV division at Microsoft. “TV is no longer a disconnected island of technology. It's becoming part of a home network that has TVs and other devices on it. The main application of the network is not to provide TV, but provide connected entertainment services.”

Outside of the home, the physical delivery infrastructure for IPTV in most cases will be fiber or a combination of fiber and other technologies like copper or coaxial cable, but here, too, wireless technology potentially could play a role. There is no reason why the physical infrastructure of IPTV can't be broadband fixed wireless technology, satellite or mobile broadcasting technology.

Satellite-based DirecTV already has talked about offering IPTV services. Digiweb, an ISP in Ireland, already has launched an IPTV service for its customers that uses wireless for the last mile. Also, companies using Fixed WiMAX and other broadband wireless technologies are, to some degree, investing in the idea that wireless can be a viable infrastructure alternative for IPTV networks. Though, with broadband wireless, limited shared bandwidth could keep its viability at a minimum.

“IPTV mostly will be terrestrial, and the reason why you don't see wireless infrastructure for IPTV now is that it does burn a fair amount of bandwidth,” said John Krzywicki, vice president of marketing for GigaBeam. Still, networking firm Telkonet recently said it would deploy GigaBeam's point-to-point WiFiber technology in a ring network in New York City that will be used for many services including, potentially, IPTV.

“In certain situations, our technology could be an extension from a terrestrial IPTV network,” Krzywicki said. “We would certainly be happy to work with the RBOCs on how to do that.”

Meanwhile, in the mobile industry, current efforts to delivery mobile TV don't involve IP technology for the most part.

“Mobile TV is not IPTV by our definition,” Graczyk said. “To us, IPTV is mainly something that is coming into the home over that pipe, and the main usage experience for most people is going to be through the TV. Internet-streamed video is not IPTV.”

However, the aforementioned mobile broadcasting networks will introduce some IP network elements and IP encapsulation into the mix. UDcast, a French vendor of IP encapsulation equipment for mobile broadcast networks, touts its technology as delivering “IPTV to the mobile.” Also, while the session initial protocol and voice over IP are foreign concepts in current mobile networks, the world's traditional mobile giants will convert their own networks to IP as they begin to adopt the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) standard.

From a network point of view, IPTV and mobile TV may continue to be parallel, but separate, trends for some time to come. Not only are many of the telcos pursuing IPTV projects more focused on terrestrial technology, but in the mobile industry, the traditional mobile carriers have not yet delved into the use of IP technology, and IMS remains a future consideration. However, from a device point of view, the IPTV and mobile TV trends may more immediately experience some form of convergence. That's because mobile devices could play a functional role in IPTV applications, and could become a beneficiary of the content flexibility available through IPTV networks.

At this point, mobile TV content seems entirely different from potential IPTV content. In an effort to cater to both the unique mobile device format and the perceived mobile user attention span, the mobile industry has begun working with the entertainment industry to develop mobisodes and other content specifically designed for mobile consumption. Meanwhile, IPTV systems won't have content specially designed for them.

“With mobile TV, it's not clear yet that the same kind of TV content works in the mobile format, so you see people developing these things like mobisodes,” said Robbie Bach, president of the entertainment and devices division for Microsoft. “But we'll want to make sure that mobile TV platforms are interoperable with IPTV and everything else.”

Michael Coyne, chief systems architect for Ericsson North America, added, “IPTV is intended to look similar to cable, but the video-on-demand aspect adds something new. Mobile TV is really evolving as a broadcast function where users tune to different channel choices. What that means is that these two things are different, but complementary. Outside the home, you might watch a mobile broadcast of something. Inside, it will be IPTV content on demand.”

Chris Ruff, president of UIEvolution, which has developed content-friendly user interfaces for mobile devices offered by providers like Mobile ESPN, pointed to a near future in which someone heading home from a day at the office will be sitting on the commuter train using the mobile phone as a programming guide for a home-based IPTV service.

“You can be sitting on the train, but you'll have mobile access to this programming guide and be able to scroll through its various options,” he said. “Then you'll pick something and watch a clip of it, and decide you want to purchase that piece of content. You'll pay for it using your phone, and when you get home, you'll turn on the TV and be ready to watch the movie you purchased.”

“No one's doing that yet, but I think service providers are thinking that way,” Ruff said. “For now, the telcos, especially in the U.S., are still busy planting fiber.”

But that vision of the future, or a very similar vision, may be much closer than we think. One way in which Microsoft has accounted for potential interoperability between IPTV systems and mobile devices is to include applications programming interfaces (APIs) that can be used to develop those applications.

“What's in our platform today are APIs that enable remote recording of TV content using some kind of Web-connected device,” Microsoft's Bach said. “Now, that could be a PC or it could be a mobile phone or something else.”

Although that capability exists in Microsoft's TV platform, it's up to carriers to create an application that actually makes use of that API.

“Remote control of a [network-based personal video recorder] is something that content providers will really push for because they want to extend their reach and how they distribute content as many ways as possible,” Ericsson's Coyne said.

Remote DVR/NPVR is just one of several IPTV capabilities that will cross into the mobile realm. Users, through digital rights management capabilities, will be able to copy content from one device to another. For instance, content could be purchased and viewed on a TV but then securely transferred to a mobile device. Users could pay one price to purchase a piece of content and another fee to share it on the network to other devices. Also, photos taken on a mobile camera phone could be uploaded to a TV.

Photo sharing could lead to the sharing of user-generated content between a mobile device and an IPTV system. Although user-generated content has been popular online and is expected to be increasingly popular among mobile video consumers, it's not yet clear whether users will want to create and share their own content via IPTV systems.

“How soon that could happen and how soon it could change things remains to be seen,” Bach said.

In the early going, IPTV providers will have to make sure that consumers are ready for such futuristic capabilities. “There's a lot you could do with IPTV where you have to be careful about making the service too feature-rich,” Graczyk said. “You want customers to be able to pick up the remote control and be able to get going without a manual. A lot of the new capabilities may get rolled in after service providers launch and customers get used to having this greater level of control over their TV viewing experience.”

How quickly the IPTV and mobile TV worlds converge depends as much on user behavior and acceptance as it does technology. Helene Henriksson, vice president of content hosting solutions for Ericsson, pointed out that mobile video right now appeals primarily to a younger demographic, while IPTV — designed to appeal to households and have more ties to traditional TV content — initially will be much more varied. However, Henriksson said initial IPTV acceptance may come through early adopters who are young and affluent, a group that is likely to overlap to some degree with mobile TV consumers.

“Service providers will need to know their segments, which segments are picking up these services as early adopters, and be able to put together the right content services for the right market segment,” she said.

Eventually, as users are ready for mobile and IPTV worlds to converge, IMS will help carriers make network operating sense of the convergence. Coyne said IMS, which is being deployed by telcos at a rate ahead of mobile carriers, will simplify management of a complex environment because all the traffic involved will be IP-based. “IMS can lend itself to a common means of authentication and policy management,” he said.

Bach added that while the industry is consumed with the packaging of triple-play services, what we should be talking about is a “single play,” in which multiple services combine into a single IP stream.

“The interesting services won't be the triple-play services, but the features that are created on the other side of that pipe, where all the previous service silos have been taken down,” he said.