With 3,500+ attendees and over 100 vendors in the two story exhibition hall, last week's IPTV World Forum event in London had all the earmarks of an event on its way up. There was a palpable buzz -- with good coverage by the international press and analyst community and speakers and attendees from a variety of North American, European, and Asia-Pac carriers. Lots of ad-hoc and earnest hallway conversations.
One attendee told me that the show felt like the "early days of VoIP." It's true....it's like the "wild-wild West" out there. An almost dizzying diversity of implementations, architectures, vendors, approaches, subscriber and revenue projections...and everybody's running hard.
Speaking of subscribers and revenue. While the commercial deployments in Europe lead those in other areas of the world, most are still trying to find their stride when it comes to subscribers and service revenue. Aside from a few of the big names, like Telefonica and France Telecom, most are still struggling to break out of the ranks of friends and family.
So, how come? IPTV, the third jewel in the wireline providers' triple play crown, the service that was meant to silence the competition, isn't delivering. Of course, there are a number of contributors from content availability and acquisition costs, complex architectures with dozens of barely interoperable vendors, unproven business models, to customers unconvinced IPTV is better than what they already have.
But one that we heard about repeatedly over the course of the week was this...service quality. Providers acknowledged that they had little to no visibility -- they don't know if the content they're receiving into their networks is good, they don't know how their networks effect the content, they're worried about whether their infrastructure and middleware can scale as their customer base does, and they don't know what their customers are experiencing at their TVs, until the phones in their customer care centers start to ring.
Before the show, we read a report from Accenture that said the single most important obstacle to IPTV adoption over the next 12 months was, not surprisingly, quality of service issues. We'll second that....
Author: Author name | posted@ Tuesday, March 13, 2007 10:40 AM
