(4 April 2008 9:30 pm)

NEW DELHI: In a discussion session on "Strategic Issues, Opportunities & Challenges for the rollout of IPTV in India", the speakers concurred that 'quality of service' and 'quality of experience' were the key issues in the growth of this service.

Chairing the session was MTNL general manager - IT (corporate) Bal Krishna Badola. The speakers included Oracle director of market development for the Asia-Pacific and Japan region, Alita Wong, director sales engineering of UTStarcom, Paresh Shah, Omnibus' manager for Asia Pacific, Andy Stanton and CEO of Innomedia Technologies Mohan Tambe.

"Value for money is a big factor in India. So the service providers need to make a conscious effort in letting people experience what IPTV has to offer. Depending on their strategy, they could give away content free of cost or subsidise the cost of STBs to aid in the shift of subscribers from cable," she added.

Badola felt that STB interoperability was important and subscribers should be given a choice to decide if and when they wanted to shift. He also went on to add that last mile reliability was very important.

The other issue that was brought up was that of standardisation. Currently, there exists a standardisation on the encoders and decoders but not on the middleware.

"Standardisation is important in the distribution front," said Shah. "But the regulators have to take into account that standardising on the content part will only hamper the growth of the IPTV operators in deploying further value added services."

"Video-on-demand and time-shifting are not enough for the operators to survive in the market," he went on to add.

Stanton saw the need for the operators to introduce compelling content and went on to say that nowadays the content wasn't too hard to find as most of the successful programs, currently aired in the US and other countries, were available in high definition.

"People are now looking for a convergent device, a device that will replace 10 other gizmos that you own. Until that happens, convergence efforts will continue," felt Tambe.

"The way the market is moving, it is obvious that the next generation of internet will happen on television," Tambe added.

Piracy is a huge concern for the operators and content providers currently. Moreover, the existing laws treat the operators harshly even if it is the subscriber who is at fault.

Pacifying some of the concerns, Wong said, "Since every subscriber has an IP address, it becomes easy to monitor. Content can be encrypted and Cas can be applied. So, unauthorised access is not a huge concern when it comes to IPTV."