What is IPTV?

Given the relatively high profile of IPTV in the telecommunications industry, it may seem strange to ask such a fundamental question. Readers of this magazine have been educated for years on the merits and challenges of delivering IPTV service. The interesting development over the past year or two has been the use — and misuse — of the term by mass-media outlets. Is the meaning of IPTV changing, and if so, does it matter?

For years, many in the industry, including me, educated video programmers regarding the differences between IPTV and video delivered over the Internet. This education process was necessary, as using video and Internet in the same sentence was a non-starter for many content owners. They feared the “Napsterization” of their content. Today, most of the content owners have moved past their fears, and IPTV is no longer seen as a licensing barrier.

I recently put together a video in which luminaries from the content ownership and distribution ecosystem gave their definition of IPTV. The definition given by Sean Riley, senior vice president of sales for Fox, captured the essence of how most in telecom would define it: “[IPTV] is a process where our distributors [franchised operators] take our linear networks and chop up the signals into little packets and send them out over a secure network and put it back together for their customers.”

Interestingly, only two of the seven people I interviewed for the video had this traditional telecom view. The other five embraced a broader definition that included video delivered over the Internet, such as through ABC.com or YouTube.

Verizon's FiOS and the European Direct Terrestrial Transmission often are labeled IPTV, even though hybrid broadcast/IPTV is a more accurate description. One former cable industry executive claimed his company had the largest IPTV network because they deliver their signals via IP-based rings to the last mile on their hybrid radio frequency fiber/coaxial network.

In the end, our relatively narrow definition of IPTV will probably go the way of now-generic trademarks such as Band-Aid, and consumers may use the term IPTV to mean any video service over any media. Whether IPTV enters the consumer lexicon is anyone's guess, but other techno terms, such as DSL, have been widely adopted by the public.

What happens if IPTV becomes a more generic and fuzzy term? In one sense, it may be very helpful and allow a telco to clearly stake its position in the market and differentiate itself from alternatives. It also means expanding an IPTV offering to embrace and deliver broadband video to customer-chosen devices in ways that provide higher quality.

Taking this more global view will help a telco shape its customers' view of IPTV to include the strengths of quality, reliability, service and local presence. If the telco can successfully define IPTV as the kind of service it provides, then anything else will be second-best in the eyes of its consumers. Now that's IPTV.