In April 2006, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) created a focus group on IPTV to coordinate and promote the development of global IPTV standards with the following agenda:

• Define IPTV
• Review and perform gap analysis of existing standards and ongoing works
• Coordinate existing standardization activities
• Harmonize the development of new standards
• Encourage interoperability with existing systems where possible

Ericsson, Matsushita's Panasonic, Philips, Samsung Electronics, Siemens AG, Sony, AT&T, Telecom Italia, and France Telecom, to work on a single IPTV standard, created an Open IPTV Forum.

The forum is open to other companies to join, supports IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) for unified Internet service delivery, and Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA). The group was planning to complete technology requirements in Sep 06 and initial specifications by Dec 06.

International Telecommunications Union (ITU)

IPTV - the Numbers

According to a recent market projection made by Gartner, by 2010 48.8 million households worldwide will subscribe to IPTV services from telecom carriers.

IPTV subscribers will double in number during 2007 to 13.3 million, which is expected to generate 13.2 billion of revenue, from the 6.4 million subscribers in 2006 who generated $872 million of revenue.

According to Gartner, one positive effect of incorporating an IPTV service into the lineup is that it would help a carrier retain current voice and broadband customers, (and coincidentally, that was actually declared by one of the Telcos that implemented IPTV, further below).

In my opinion, it could also be negative to the carrier if the IPTV service starts to show technical flaws like video breakups, program interruptions, etc.

A combination of reasons could produce a flawed service, from limited bandwidth, to hardware choices, software bugs, or simply because the technology might not be mature enough yet for the particular implementation, which was the case with several Telcos mentioned further below.

From another research source, Infonetics Research projected worldwide IPTV subscribers doubling up yearly between 2005-09, totaling 68.9 million by 2009.

"IPTV is still in the 'kick the tire' phase, with service providers doing trials rather than mass deployments, but there's no question that IPTV is going mainstream," said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband and IPTV at Infonetics.

According to a forecast from iSuppli published by CED in March 07, worldwide revenues to be generated from Pay TV shows that IPTV services would grow more rapidly than the same services from cable and satellite.

In the next article in this series, I will discuss the different ways in which IPTV is being implemented as well as some companies who already have working models in place.

Next Article: IPTV Part 3 - The Methods and a Working Technology