IPTV World Forum: Moving beyond the triple play

“The three dimensions driving growth today are by no means the end game of what consumers will drive demand,” Tapp said. “The key driver will be a fourth dimension of an interactive, creative, connected service. The fourth dimension is about a personalized service delivered to a fragmented audience with social connections to others.”

Among these new services, social networking and user-generated content have the best shot at monetizing the platform, Tapp said. Combined, they will represent 10% of IPTV revenue by 2011. That’s a bigger share for this fast-growing segment than for video itself, according to IDC.

“The potential comes from services that blend entertainment with communication to deliver a social connected experience – these will have the best success in monetizing the platform,” Tapp said.

This was good news for at least one vendor in the audience. Integra5, which has typically focused on converging telephony functions with television viewing, plans to also blend social media with the TV in the coming month. According to Steve Borelli, vice president of business development for Integra5, the new application will bring new social media functions on to the TV set, including letting viewers chat SMS-style with friends about the content they are both viewing in their separate locations.

“Development of services like that is not as far away as most people had originally thought,” Borelli said. “They have already proven popular; they just needed the migration away from only bundling services to developing true converged services across multiple devices.”

In IPTV’s survival of the fittest environment, the service is in the early stages of the evolving from bundling to enhanced services. Tapp illustrated the path to this goal as being through interactivity, personalized viewing and more content choices. More than anything, the next strategic step is services that have the most potential for innovation and differentiating the service.

“Once all this evolution has been achieved, then we can say we’ve arrived at the destination,” Tapp concluded. “The destination that truly brings what consumers can already see is where they want to be. They are just waiting for service providers to get there and give them what they want – an individual TV experience. The winners will be those who innovate first, execute first and become the next generation’s televisionaries.”