By Tim Young

Television: The old chestnut often attributed to comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs, but most likely first uttered by radio great Paul Allen is, to paraphrase, that television is called a medium because it is neither rare nor well done. In the decades that have passed since the heyday of both men, TV has become far more ubiquitous and, from a technical aspect, still occasionally poorly done... though not for lack of trying on the part of CSPs.

Cable companies are clearly the frontrunners in this regard, and telcos have been involved in the triple and quad play fray for a long tome now, thanks to partnerships with satellite providers. However, the growing opportunities of delivering telco-based TV, directly from the pipe that's already coming into the home for voice and data services, is alluring for the telco set.

What form that service takes, however, is up for debate.

Semantics

For most outside of the communications space, all TV coming from a telco is IPTV, and all IPTV comes from a telco. (To the extent that people even care where they get their bits. Increasingly, customer loyalty to a specific access technology is weak, at best. An unhappy customer is liable to churn to whatever company offers them reliability and speed at a desirable price point.) However, this, of course, is faulty. The video offerings from Verizon, for example, aren't really IPTV, and the IPTV hardware and software vendors are quick to remind cablecos that IPTV can work in the cable context, too.

However, in order to pare down the discussion to a reasonable scope, we'll skip the topic of IPTV in the cable space, and focus on telco-based TV services, IPTV or otherwise. For the purposes of this article, we'll be speaking of telco video offerings more broadly, including non-IPTV applications.

Telecom Italia, Fastweb, and Wind have launched a website informing Italian consumers of the benefits of IPTV service in hopes of drumming up business. (While figures for the other companies were unavailable at press time, Telecom Italia is sitting at around 365,000 subs for its "Alice home TV").

According to Ovum Korea, the South Korean IPTV market is growing and will continue to grow strongly, but opposition from cable is still a major challenge, and that's in a country with outstanding broadband penetration (among the highest in the world, at 92.6% of households, according to Ovum). The challenge there has everything to do with price point and marketing, it seems.

From an OSS/BSS standpoint, many battles of actually delivering IPTV were fought and won several years ago. It's viable. It works. However, telcos still have the not-so-simple task of maintaining the sorts of due diligence that is required to make sure everything keeps churning along.