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IPTV: time to prepare for the mass market

IPTV is now on the threshold of becoming a mass-market service. Standards, performance and scalability address the issues of cost and risk that have held the market back so far.

October 13, 2006

The business and technology conditions are right: now it's time for network operators and their partners to define their TV via broadband (IPTV) business models and begin implementing their solutions.

And Ericsson's new Full Service Broadband will support the operators, offering a combined mobile and fixed broadband solution.

Today IPTV delivers broadcast and on-demand TV content over fixed broadband lines. But the real beauty of IPTV lies in its ability to offer much more than this in the future. Broadband networks are a two-way medium that can carry a large number of services and content in both directions.

With the right combination of standardized technologies, telecom operators and their partners have an opportunity to use IPTV technology to deliver truly interactive, personalized TV services with integrated media and communications. And with IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) playing a major role in these offerings, the vision of converged 'quadruple play' (combined telephony, Internet, TV and mobile) services can become a mass-market reality.

Through the integration of standardized communications, content and media systems, IPTV will give telecom operators a way to deliver interactive, personalized multimedia services, no matter where the viewer is. Users will have access to a much larger selection of TV channels than today, with the ability to choose content on demand - customized to their own profiles - whenever it suits them.

Integrating standards based IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) with IPTV enables new interactive services. Users will not only be able to view video on demand, wherever they are, but also talk, chat, send text messages and take part in things like voting and consumer polling - which could evolve into purchase transactions and targeted, interactive advertising.

IPTV will also be a godsend for advertisers, who will be able to find out who is watching, what, where and when, enabling them to deliver highly targeted advertising that is not only suitable for the particular demographic, but also to the context in which viewers are watching.

Earlier this year, Ericsson launched an end-to-end IPTV solution for the delivery of a complete range of IPTV services. It includes: set top box, home gateway, access, core network, middleware, a content delivery platform, DRM (Digital Rights Management) and encoding compression technology. This enables  services such as broadcast TV, Video on Demand (VoD) and network Personal Video Recorder (nPVR), users can then decide what content to view, and when. Ericsson is industrializing its IPTV solution to provide telecom-grade performance and scalability. The solution also includes guidelines for integration with systems for charging and service provisioning/activation. Ericsson provides professional services for advising, integrating and managing a complete end-to-end IPTV solution.

Successful IPTV solutions will not only need to match the scalability and performance of modern telecoms networks, they will also need to interwork very closely and reuse a lot of functions across IPTV, mobile TV and other services - especially when it comes to pricing, bundling, billing and customer care.

To deliver this vision and create a mass market for personalized multimedia services, operators need a combination of standardized, scalable technologies, capable of delivering IPTV to all different device types. This is why Ericsson is driving the harmonization of IPTV and related services delivered over broadband, based on open standards.