IPTV World Forum: Moving beyond the triple play

CHICAGO – Aggressive discounting of the service bundle might have won subscribers to IPTV, but it won’t retain them. These subscribers crave new services across multiple platforms, according to Ian Tapp, senior vice president of business development for Tandberg Television, a division of the Ericsson group, in today’s keynote address at the IPTV World Forum’s North American debut. Tapp and Ericsson’s message to service providers, delivered primarily through the sentiments of teens, is that service providers must become televisionaries – not just TV providers but visionaries for the future of services and convergence.

“I think the compelling business case for convergence is likely to be driven by well-identified, value-added services that increase revenue not only through subscriber growth and retention but through new revenue services,” Tapp said, adding that new services should be the key focus for driving IPTV.

In past iterations of the IPTV World Forum’s global conferences, most of the discussion centered on achieving scale for IPTV and getting over the initial roadblocks. This year, the tides are clearly changing. According to MRG, there are 671 deployed IPTV services, 100 more than this time last year. Europe is still leading the pack, but North America is catching up – driven by AT&T and Verizon and aided by the rapid growth of small, rural providers.

Both Tapp and Steven Hawley, senior IPTV analyst with MRG, in a subsequent presentation, stressed the role that the millennial generation, or generation Y, has had in driving this growth. These digital natives were born into digital technology. They are native speakers of the language of computers, video games and the Internet after having networked for most of lives through constant connectivity to the net. They don’t necessarily want features, they want relevance and quality. The means to achieving this is through new services across all of this generation’s most valued devices – the PC, TV and mobile handset.

“One of the real potentials for IPTV and telecom services in general is multiservice convergence,” Hawley said. “It’s beyond the triple play to any content, access or device, time- and place-shifting, personalized and social media, integrated telephony and messaging, and Internet content within the TV experience.”

Those typically – but not necessarily – older digital immigrants have to varying degrees joined the connected Internet world as well. It is these two segments that are driving the trends in digital television services and the shift from a purely linear, passive viewing experience of standard-definition content to an increasingly more personalized service with more content choices, all in high definition.