Participants at Network Ventures 2006, a Dow Jones VentureWire event held February 8 and 9 in San Jose, CA shared a few insights on IPTV:
- Potential market: Every broadband and mobile subscriber worldwide.
- Market situation: Cable providers are closer to achieving IPTV than telephone companies, putting telcos under enormous pressure to rollout and keep their customers from being poached by cable, particularly once VoIP is available on a wide scale.
- IPTV's value proposition: By combining search capabilities with digital video recording, video on demand, channel guides, navigational tools, users can create fully customized programming. Marketers will be able to use search data to target marketing.
- Advertising opportunity: Convergence will provide a potential for creating a single, fully searchable ecosystem of information about consumers' interests, needs and habits. It will be a completely new way for advertising and will present a huge marketing opportunity.
- Forecast: By 2006 end, 1.2 million people in the U.S. will subscribe to IPTV. Within three years, 54 million people worldwide will have IPTV, 13 million of them in North America; and by 2015, it will be ubiquitous.
- Barriers to successful wide deployment of IPTV: High-definition video requires far more bandwidth than voice or data to carry multiple video streams without quality issues which current networks lack.
For more on these insights:
- read iMedia Communications article