BitBand CEO discusses the top trends for IPTV in 2008

IPTV has been slowly making its way from over-hyped technology to widespread reality, making 2007 “the year IPTV got real,” according to Telephony’s end of the year review. If 2007 was the year for service providers to advance their early services, then 2008 should be the year they perfect them. Telephony Associate Editor Sarah Reedy spoke to Ervin Leibovici, chief executive officer of content delivery provider BitBand, to get his perspective on the trends that will drive IPTV in 2008.

On the most significant IPTV trend – content overload: You have a huge amount of content becoming available from just about every source, but in particular, from three sources: Television on demand – increasing chunks of TV are bound to become available to us on demand. If you think of 500 channels times 24 hours a day times a year of broadcasting, that is a lot of content. Niche content – it is so easy to produce content, and everyone is trying to differentiate from everyone else, so you see more and more content becoming available in the form of TV channels or Internet-available content or special series…User generated content – one of the byproducts of technology being so easy to use is that it is very easy to generate content. It is not yet studio quality, but it is good enough to be shared amongst friends, which brings the same interest in the content itself.

On the importance of quality in IPTV: When you have such an abundance of services and content and network types, quality in itself becomes a differentiator of the service. You are going to see a lot of emphasis on quality on each and every business service that is provided, doesn’t matter what device or what network.

On the convergence of the Internet and TV: People have failed to understand that the Internet is an individual device. People sit on their PC or their mobile device and use the Internet for themselves using a keyboard of some sort. It is a one-to-one experience, and your language is lots of little buttons. TV is enormously different, just about in every way. It is a family or group experience, not an individual experience. The language you use to speak with it is a remote control, and the fewer the buttons on the remote control, the more it sells, the conclusion being that you really want to have two or three buttons or as few as possible because no one will use the rest anyways. The main reason that transforming the TV into an Internet device has failed is because people have not recognized these two effects and have tried to just provide access to the regular Internet as it is with some minor adaptations to the TV set, which is a totally different device.