IPTV era begins to take shape

Though not typically a “telco show,” the International CES is quickly becoming a hot venue for carriers launching new services. At this year's event, Verizon and AT&T both provided the first glimpses of their IPTV products, with the former giving a peek of what's coming down the road and the latter debuting its more sedate 1.0 product.

Verizon's FiOS TV product, which is available in more than a dozen markets, will provide at least some of the initial whiz-bang impact that IPTV proponents have been promising for years when the carrier rolls out some of the services it demonstrated at CES. Key among those is the ability to personalize the viewing experience through a sizable amount of video-on-demand (VOD) titles (1800 currently available), a new gaming network and an interface that is relatively easy to navigate. Verizon's vision of its video product, in fact, is driven largely by a desire not to create a me-too product.

“We have to come up with more bells and whistles — better bells and whistles,” Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg said.

Initial results also have been encouraging in further developing the product. In Keller, Texas, where Verizon first launched FiOS TV, the company has captured 20% of the market with most of those customers buying a bundled package of voice, high-speed data and video.

“The real trick is that the pricing was right, and the bundle was easy,” Seidenberg said. “This is really viral. We're seeing similar results in other markets.”

The company is taking perhaps its biggest risk with the Verizon Gaming Network, which lets subscribers play games on dedicated servers within the Verizon network or drop in on public ones. What makes it relatively unique is the company's targeting of hard-core gamers with a lot of first-person action titles. Among the few other carriers that have launched TV-based gaming services, titles tend to target an older and decidedly more female demographic. However, Verizon is betting that its ability to bring 100 Mb/s — and no latency — to every household will be a big attraction to the traditional gamer.

AT&T, meanwhile, is keeping things a little closer to the vest, showing only what it launched in controlled trials earlier this month in San Antonio. While lacking the pizzazz of Verizon's interface, AT&T's U-verse video service is meant to be a baseline product, said Jeff Weber, vice president of product and strategy for AT&T.

“The 1.0 is really a parity product in the sense that it matches cable and satellite at the category level,” he said. “We're very comfortable with this in the marketplace, and I'm very comfortable with this as a 1.0 product that I can build on.”

Among the more unique elements of AT&T's service will be its heavy use of picture-in-picture technology. In navigating the electronic program guide, for instance, users will not only see text descriptions of programming on other channels, they also can see live video. When browsing through VOD, the service will show a poster of the particular movie, but eventually the company wants to provide a small preview of the content.

“This is just a hint of where we're going to go,” Weber said.