European IPTV - Scientific Atlanta

SUPPLEMENT SPONSORSEuropean IPTVNew 2005 IPTV Euro-deploymentsCountry DSL/FTTH Operator Location NotesIreland FTTH Magnet Networks Dublin New build homesFrance DSL T-Online France National Sold as "Club Internet"Russia DSL Stream TV Moscow Target 150,000 subsBelgium DSL Belgacom Wallonia 1,000 strong pilotAustria DSL AonDigital Vienna Autumn launchItaly DSL Telecom Italia Major cities Trial to 1,000 homesUK DSL BT Entertainment Nationwide Trial spring '06digital migration and exploit advancedvideo services like HDTV, VOD,television-on-demand and PersonalVideo Recorders. But in a world of tripleplayservices, television cannot beentirely separated from the overallservice package and the cable industrywill improve its high-speed data speedsand expand voice offerings, especiallythrough Voice over IP. Some Europeancable operators even have ambitions tooffer mobile voice services.Typical is an August announcementfrom UK cable operator NTL. A year agoNTL was in bankruptcy protection.Today it is in a much healthier state,likely to merge with the UK’s othercable company Telewest, once Telewesthas sold off its Flextech channelsbusiness. The company is ready to giveBT a fight and CEO Simon Duffy saysNTL will offer customers up to 10Mbps“as standard” for broadband access,although only promising a serviceintroduction by the end of 2006.NTL is also talking of introducing aninterim service called ‘The TurboButton,’ which will burst a connectionto higher speeds when customers aredownloading bandwidth-heavy contentlike video. This all follows a trend in UScable to improve the data offer.Comcast, for example, has announced anew top residential tier of 8Mbps.Up to now NTL has been offeringcustomers three tiers of broadbandcovering 1Mbps, 2Mbps and 3Mbps butDuffy has admitted that the operator isnow losing customers to rivaloperators in what he described as a“more intense competitiveenvironment”.At this year’s ECCA Congress (theannual gathering of the European CableCommunications Association) therewas much talk about ‘platform wars’.2006 will clearly see more IPTVprogress, especially as the largercommitments achieve meaningfuldeployment and confidence builds.Cable companies, whether in the UK,the Netherlands, Germany orelsewhere will fight to retain marketshare and some will even invest inIPTV-based services themselves.For the irony is that where IPTV,using DSL in particular, proves to be aviable access network for new TVservices, cable can also exploit thisnew medium. There is nowThe IPTV everywhere visionconsiderable interest among Europeancable operators in using unbundledlocal-loops to deliver video-over-DSLservices of their own. They can useDSL to expand their existing videoservices into markets where theyhave no HFC infrastructure andwhere building an HFC architectureis uneconomic.The very technology that is allowingincumbent telcos to fight back againstcable, with video services, can also beused by cable to take on the telcos innew markets. The interest in IPTValso reveals a new mindset in somecable companies – less wedded to aspecific transmission infrastructureand more inclined to view themselvesas media service providers who willuse the best access networktechnology available to them.France Telecom and its big telconeighbours have shown that there isplenty of life left in twisted copper pair.But at the end of the day, IPTV is atechnical definition for an on-demandvideo or broadcast television service (orboth) that is delivered using IPtransport for the last mile access. Untilnow the term ‘IPTV’ could be used todefine a market characterised byincumbent and new entrant telcos withvideo services. In future it could be lessclear who the IPTV operators are.Sean Carton, chief experience officer at Carton Donofrio Partners, aBaltimore-based brand and interactive creative agency, has outlined thelong-term implications for consumers now that television is being deliveredwithin IP packets.“In reality, all digital media will, at some point, be packaged and ‘tagged’ insuch a way the elements can be reconstituted on the various devices we use. Insome respects, all content will exist online as a vast, distributed database. Wecan tap in using TVs, handheld devices, and computers.“To some extent, this has already happened. But with the development ofIPTV (and other technologies), it will eventually become an everyday reality.Between always-on broadband and ubiquitous wireless connectivity, consumerswill be (and are) able to tap into an ever-growing cloud of content. It can beexperienced on any one of a growing inventory of networked devices.The number of content choices consumers have access to is staggering andwill only continue to grow.”European IPTVSupplementpage ninewww.cable-satellite.com