Telcos Meeting to Explore IP Video Delivery
Nov 10, 2005 8:00 AM
If delivering video, voice communications, and data through a single broadband connection is, as VBrick’s Rich Mavrogeanes says, “the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” then this week’s Telco TV Conference and Expo in San Diego is packed with telephony specialists who would like to find that pot and take it home.
Underlying the promise of this triple play is the rapid emergence of Internet Protocol Television services (IPTV). While many players are focused on the huge potential market for delivering television to homes, prospective applications for IPTV in the corporate arena are also expanding as more users realize the benefits to be reaped from a single converged network.
“If you want to deliver voice, data, and video over one network, the only network capable of doing it is IP,” says Mavrogeanes.
"The goal of Telco TV Conference and Expo is to provide a focused and comprehensive IPTV experience for all interested parties. Whether researching a future IPTV deployment, perfecting an existing one, or seeking new distribution channels for entertainment content...,” write co-chairs A. Bernardin Arnason of the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association (NTCA) and Carolyn Herr of Shorecliff Communications, which manages the event at the San Diego Convention Center, in a letter posted on NTCA's website.
NTCA’s constituency is made up of small rural and other independent telecom service providers, for whom the expense of extending broadband connectivity to large numbers of subscribers might be more than paid off if member companies can deliver video programming along with telephony and Internet access.
On the eve of the conference, NTCA announced an alliance with the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative to develop IPTV services for launch in 2006.
Meanwhile, major networking vendors are committing to IPTV in a big way. Tandberg TV has announced partnerships to provide telcos with the means to deliver MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video over their DSL lines. Microsoft is intensively promoting its Microsoft TV product line, reaching out not only to broadcasters but to production companies and asset management specialists.
Universities have already emerged as early adopters of IPTV, delivering video over IP to dorm rooms and other facilities where students can access a broad range of content and services interactively at any time.
For the corporate user, the pot of gold may indeed be finding a way to deliver high-quality video programming on demand right to employee desktops, through the organization’s existing IP network. Mavrogeanes says located behind the corporate firewall, this environment would be a walled off garden in which corporate priorities and needs would come first.
Training programs, for example, could be accessed at will. Fully interactive conferences with high-definition video would also be routed over the IP infrastructure, as would all of the organization’s ordinary telephone traffic. In fact, Mavrogeanes anticipates “infinite availability of both live and archived content.”
To achieve this outcome, though, all three parts of the triple play have to be both digital and optimized for IP transmission—a goal that’s still some distance off for many corporations, experts say.
Acceptable Use Policy blog comments powered by Disqus
