OK, good to see these forums underway.

Given the recent spate of announcements (BT/Microsoft, Telewest, Sky, France Telecom) around planned IPTV deployments in the UK, what do forum members feel as to the likely impact on the UK Digital TV market? Will 'Pure Play' IPTV become a fourth delivery channel for Digital TV (alongside DTT, DSAT and Cable) in its own right, or will IPTV delivery emerge as part of a Hybrid solution? Will it follow the emergent French and Italian models? Or will it fail to make an impact altogether? And on what timescales?

I raised some of these points, and offered an opinion that a hybrid model will ultimately emerge in a recent presentation to the EBU (reproduced at http://www.ebu.ch/trev_home.html - lots of good, if rather technical stuff in here).

Thoughts and views?

Andrew Fawcett
andrew.fawcett@kcom.com

 

An interesting post from Morgan Stanley in regards to BSkyB.

"We continue to see a high likelihood of increased competition (from cable and IPTV) putting pressure on revenue growth and inflating BSkyB's programming costs and capex in the mid-term."

http://www.newratings.com/analyst_news/article_969523.html

We are launching our service into the UK in March on a trial run.

We hope to have full deployment over the summer.

Our service will initially be the 'Pure Play' version with streaming and possible Free View Hybrid coming as well.

I think that IPTV will not affect Sky as much as it will affect cable in as much that I believe that IPTV will succeed in areas such as flats where the tenant does not want to install a dish or is unable to install the dish, but can still get internet access.