When is best of breed a dog?

In recent conversations with several vendors two things have become clear: most people are just guessing when comes to picking winners in the IPTV world; and placing your bets on every contender is a sure fire way to lose most of your money but generate a fair number of press releases.

The news coming out of this past weekend's IBC show seemed to focus more on vendors jockeying for position than any real substantive news about major deployments. Look past the headlines, though, and the smart money is on most of these alliances and partnerships last about as long as the average Larry King marriage.

In the early days of IPTV, like in voice-over-IP before and voice-over-DSL before that, vendors are rushing into the market, and in some cases making claims that within two years will be ridiculed. The set-top box market alone has about two dozen vendors all vying for contracts when, according to several analysts, the market has about three or four manufacturers at most.

What makes IPTV somewhat unique, though, is the interdependency of vendors on one another. Without the video server to dish up the video-on-demand, the access vendor has nothing to offer. Without the DSLAM/BLC/BAS/insert your favorite acronym here, the set-top box has nothing to connect it to the outside world. Which brings us to a term that has so far been thankfully missing from IPTV, but is starting to creep back in: best of breed.

The best of breed theory, which has proven itself with purebred dogs and thoroughbreds, holds that if you bring together the best of every element, you end up with the best sum of the parts. In the technology world, though, the requirement that everything work together can lead best-of-breed partners into a finger-pointing exercise. In some cases, of course, things work out great because the partners pre-establish who is responsible for every potential hazard.

On the flip side, there is a small group of vendors that believe they can do everything on their own. While avoiding the integration work required by best-of-breed solutions, the end-to-end approach has its own pitfalls, the largest being for carriers that get so close to one vendor that the contract becomes more of a straightjacket. At the same time, some carriers like the idea of having one neck to wring.

While lacking a crystal ball, I can predict the following with reasonable certainty. Most of the partnerships, alliances and pacts will fall apart when one partner realizes the other brings nothing of value to the table; the number of vendors claiming some IPTV connection will continue to rise until early next year and then rapidly fade; and carriers will initially look for one neck to strangle and slowly migrate to best of breed.

E-mail me at vvittore@primediabusiness.com