The IPTV Mess: We’re All Great

The cable vs telco fight is beginning to border on ridiculousness: there’s way too much posturing going on in the industry. Proof of concept is not proof that it will work, neither will stuffing money down the pipes mean the pipes will become smart. At this point, all the hype is just what it is: hype.

SBC vs Verizon vs Sprint vs Insert Your Name..yeah, yeah. Anyway, just read these three rather conflicting stories to understand the posturing in the industry:

Verizon Ready to Bundle Up: Robert Ingalls, president of Verizon’s retail market groups said his company would pretty much follow cable’s pattern of bundling channels into packages of popular and little-watched program services, and yes, the concept of IPTV is “probably pretty overblown.” This coming from Verizon…

Sprint Cozies Up To Cable Marketers: Sprint says to cablecos: partner with us, we’ll help you ward-off the telco threat, but we won’t give you any branding. John Garcia, Sprint’s senior VP of sales and distribution says the MVNO concept is hyped up..this coming from a company who is selling MVNO infrastructure to ESPN and Disney. Not the best of things to say at this point..

The war of the wires: The Economist weighs in, and thinks that there’s a conspiracy waiting to happen: the telecoms firms are building into their residential gateways new technology that will inspect the packets of zeros and ones passing through. This will let them identify traffic from third-party rivals, which might then end up at the back of the queue and thus be slow and patchy. Not a new scenario, though…

Meanwhile, an analyst at Jupiter thinks that UK is not an IPTV heaven, despite what the vendors and other research agencies make you think. Again, adds to the confusion.

Comments have been disabled for this post