TIA report ignores IPTV

Go to the index of the Telecom Industry Association's latest 378-page market report and you will be surprised to see there is no reference to IPTV under "I" in the index. There are scattered references under country specific titles, but while VoIP gets an entire section of attention, the report is virtually silent about the industry's biggest new capital play. There are some scant references to European IPTV numbers but, by my observation, there was not a number mentioned in the U.S. market section.

Nor any detailed analysis of the video and rich media market so obviously driving much of the industry economics. Indeed the TIA and its lead research group, Wilkofsky Gruen, seem strangely stuck in yesterday's industry structure. With Verizon now having a million FiOS customers and AT&T aggressively chasing a similar number through its U-verse business, the industry clearly believes its future is tied to being able to offer video and other rich media services. Toss in the 160 million global households expected to hook up the TV to the Internet over the next four years, the boom in on-line gaming, the whole P2P networking phenomena, the user-generated-video explosion and the imminent shift to video on demand--and maybe we might see a new chapter in the 2009 TIA market report.

For more:
- TIA forecast

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