Editor's Corner



Yesterday's IPTV Evolution show co-located at Internet Telephony was an entertaining and educational drill down into the market dynamics surrounding all things IPTV content. The Diffusion Group's Colin Dixon gave a masterful presentation of the ever-expanding Long Tail of video content, culminating in an urgent call for an electronic programming guide that works. If you solve this content navigation problem, "your customers will love you," Dixon predicted.

During the panel called "Myriad Content Offerings" a few of the panelists debated the true definition of IPTV and whether Internet TV should be classified as such, which is interesting given today's number 5 top story (see below). The debate crept up again during a panel on advertising as a question from the audience asked whether a Google-Adsense-like approach to advertising exists for the video space yet. IPTV providers have yet to seriously explore such an undertaking, but I noted that months before its acquisition of YouTube, Google scooped up a little company called Neven Vision, which just happened to specialize in video search so video search-based advertising should come this year. Well, it looks like I was right, but a bit too conservative on the timing: Today, Google announced their intent to launch a better video search service that will work with their AdSense service: "Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world's online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted." 

As we mentioned at the show, all presentations will be made available on the IPTV Evolution website in the next couple of days. Many thanks to all the panelists and presenters as well as to TMC and Internet Telephony.

Join us in September for the next genesis of IPTV Evolution. -Brian