TelcoTV: AT&T’s Hill Says IPTV Scales, Offers ‘Forward” Look

IPTV is out there and telcos like AT&T Inc. have proven it can scale. All that needs to happen now is for service providers to figure out which enhanced services will stick with subscribers. That was essentially the message from Peter Hill, vice president for video and converged services with AT&T Labs. Hill was the opening keynote speaker Wednesday at the TelcoTV show in Atlanta.

“We’re past the point of ‘Will IPTV scale?’” said Hill, adding this was the basic question the industry was aiming to answer just a year ago.

For its part, Hill said, AT&T now provides IPTV services to more than 126,000 customers, and is approaching 10,000 IPTV installations per week.

Its IPTV service includes more than 320 channels, of which more than 30 are high-definition, according to Hill. Subscribers can record up to four programs at once, get picture-in-picture (even if their TVs don’t have that capability), have the ability to search programming by title or actor, receive whole home DVR, and can remotely set their DVR feature via their cell phone, PC or TV. Hill said AT&T has also announced a handful of applications including Yahoo! games, Yellow Pages and a Widgets-type option that allows customers to get news, stock information and the like through a picture-in-picture screen on their TVs.

Beyond that, Hill offered a variety of demos he initially framed as “forward-looking” work at AT&T Labs, but during a Q&A following his presentation said: “This is not the AT&T roadmap in any way, shape or form.”

That included the ability to integrate the IPTV experience with e-mail and SMS; a call management application running on the TV; the ability for U-verse subscribers to receive videos from AT&T Videoshare customers on their TVs; the ability to listen to podcasts on the TV; and a “family finder” feature that tracks the whereabouts of family members using a wireless phone, GPS technology and a mapping application.

“We didn’t create maps … or GPS,” said Hill, adding that what AT&T could bring to the table in offering such an application would be delivering it via IPTV.

Indeed, that was the common thread that ran through all the applications demoed by Hill today – that they are all essentially things that are available today over the Internet. Hill himself admitted that in saying that rather than creating new applications, AT&T can “reach out to the decades of innovation on the Web.”

AT&T Inc. www.att.com

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