Convergence – What’s With IPTV?

You are what you watch!

Before you grimace with pain from my personal pun on another well-known adage, please read a little bit farther and allow me to set the stage.

We are now in the middle of 2010 and the dust is finally starting to settle on a whole set of unfounded concepts and ill-fated initiatives related to what many see as the Holy Grail of electronic entertainment services: IPTV.

One more time, the consumer has spoken and won the argument. How did I figure that out? Well, numbers don’t lie (only statistics do). So, let’s simply look at the numbers.

First of all, all the rumors about the death of broadcast TV appear to have been definitely, greatly exaggerated. For an average household in the U.S., the TV set is on for an average of 6.5 hours per day, and due to all these “green" initiatives, fewer and fewer people actually use it just for heating.

On the other hand, one in the coffin, with the nails done being hammered in, is the concept of planned video watching. That is, before you leave your house in the morning, you set up your DVR to record the programs that you will watch that evening. While DVRs may have found a good niche for recording pinpointed television programs, 93 percent of all video ingesting is impulse-based.

A la carte charging models proponents had a similarly rude awakening. It is now crystal clear that consumers dislike incremental charging and are much more likely to opt for flat-rate plans. Neither are they willing to pay more than once for the same content viewed on different screens.

Finally, the reality is dawning that a particular screen will not displace the others and that all three screens (TV, PC and cell phone) will coexist for the foreseeable future. As a matter of fact, the trend is for these screens to be used concurrently with 82 percent of TV watchers surfing the ‘Net on a different screen at the same time.

One concept that is being denied the right to lie in peace is interactive TV, which, for some reason, is still being considered by some marketing types to be an essential component of IPTV. However, there is an “I" but no “P" in “Interactive." Time after time, both market research and actual trial deployments have confirmed that TV viewing is primarily a passive activity and that the great majority of viewers actually do not want to interact with their television sets. Looking again at the numbers presented above, it should be obvious that any purported interactive behavior is actually multitasking and, furthermore, is definitely directed toward a secondary screen such as a PC or laptop.

One would have also expected that the industry’s enthusiasm for interactive TV would have been dampened by the fact that Tru2way, for all practical purposes, has ceased to exist, with the only prospective supplier, Panasonic, recently announcing that it would not support the technology anymore within their televisions.

Customer behavior with regard to interactivity should have reinforced to the industry the principle that any new displacement-oriented technology must first address existing services, in this particular case, broadcast television, before attempting to introduce new ones. Adequate support by IPTV for such legacy services is still spotty. The bandwidth availability and the bit error rates of many IPTV offerings typically are not a match for the quality of the multimedia, channel-switching times and graceful degradation capabilities of traditional broadcast television.

These items must first be addressed before attempting to jump on the interactivity bandwagon. If channel-switching times challenges can not be met, never mind trying to add interactivity on top of that. Video and interactivity do not fare well within buffer and retransmission-oriented technologies.

While I have been singing that tune for quite a while, I seem to only recently have developed a fan club. It may have taken a while for telecom professionals to come to grip with the realities of electronic video distribution and the fact that broadcast television, in many ways, is closer to conversional communications than it is to data services.

Finally, more voices are being heard in the industry, advocating the need for a high-performance and flexible network that can support conversational, entertainment and data services. And I can personally assure you that it will not be based on our current data networks.

Serge Fourcand is a principal engineer with Huawei Technologies USA.  He is an accomplished product manager and system architect with extensive multimedia experience in both consumer and telecom industry segments, including advanced multimedia distribution, digital signal processing, Ethernet Layer 2 transport and switching, and end-to-end telecommunications technology.