IPTV Ready for Play Time, But HD Still Largely on the Sidelines

Time to market is a crucial issue for telcos getting into IPTV.

That was the message from Jim White, vice president of marketing for Alcatel’s access networks division, who along with SBC’s Jeff Weber was one of the keynote speakers at today’s Telco TV show in San Diego.

Timing is important, he said, because as people buy new, digital TVs they will also likely look to upgrade to new digital TV services, which provides telcos an opening to grab customers from the cable companies. According to White, consumers this year will purchase 20 million digital TVs while only 8 million analog sets will be bought. And by 2007, 30 percent of households will have a digital TV, meaning digital TV at that point will be considered mass market.

“When people go shopping for new TV service, will you have a service in the market?” White asked the Telco TV audience.

SBC’s Weber noted in his speak that the giant telcos last month concluded its last technical field trial of IPTV and is readying to launch the services commercially. Weber mentioned in his speech that “you can’t go in without HD or without DVR.”

While speakers and exhibitors at this week’s Telco TV reiterated again and again that IPTV is a proven technical that’s here today, an important point that was not emphasized is the fact that high-definition TV remains a missing piece in many telco TV offerings.

Dan Smith, vice president of engineering and planning at independent telco Comporium Group out of South Carolina, says HD is highly sought after option by many high-end users, and adds that some people building large homes even finance expensive TVs as part of their mortgages.

Comporium didn’t want to miss out on the high-end user opportunity, but Smith that the necessary tools are not available now to allow him to deliver HDTV over the company’s new fiber-based IPTV network based on Wave7 Optics gear. So Comporium is employing the RF overlay capabilities of the Wave7 equipment to support both HD and DVR, he explains.

Amino already offers an IPTV set-top box with HD capabilities, which the vendor just announced SureWest Communications is using. SureWest has already rolled out Amino's AmiNET120 HD set-top box to a core group of subscribers in the Sacramento, Calif., region. "Many cable companies have begun to deploy HD services in an effort to attract more subscribers," comments Bill DeMuth, SureWest's vice president and chief technology officer. “Therefore, time to market was a critical factor for us in selecting the AmiNET120, in addition to fundamental quality."

But even after HDTV-capable IPTV set-tops using MPEG-2 compression became available from Amino it took a considerable amount of work to adjust processor settings in the terminals to achieve requisite picture quality, says SureWest CTO Bill DeMuth. “HDTV over IPTV is pretty cutting edge, even with MPEG-2,” DeMuth comments. “You don’t have a lot of (processing) overhead to play with, so everything has to be balanced to where you’re not making tradeoffs too far in one direction or another.” (For more on this, see related story in this section.)

Meanwhile, Thomson says its 1100 IPTV set-top boxes, which will support HD, are now in tests and are expected to be available in quantity in the first quarter of 2006.

Motorola expects to have IPTV MPEG2 set-tops that deliver a single stream over VDSL with HDTV capability ready in the first quarter of 2006 and will offer a set-top box supporting MEG2/4, standard-definition, HD and DVR beginning in the second quarter of 2006, says spokesman Floyd Wagoner.

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