(7 April 2008 2:00 pm)

NEW DELHI: Infrastructure and piracy are the key concerns for the growth of IPTV in India.

Motorala country sales manager Kanan Krishnan pointed out to a dichotomy: the cable operators have the last mile but were not looking at IPTV as a business opportunity while the telcos have the money to invest, especially in fibre, but have neither the last mile nor understand the business of content.

Krishnan, who spends considerable time with broadcasters, MSOs and telcos, said that the problem of the last mile was a real issue.

Krishnan opined that IPTV would force changes in telco corporate structures, where the top managements would have to be content savvy.

Furthermore, the cable companies would now need to become dynamic corporate players and "leave their mindset legacies behind".

He also said that IPTV required to be looked at as an application of broadband, rather than TV on internet.

Krishnan pointed out that the telcos who were going for IPTV were actually looking at DTH (direct-to-home) for video business and wondered if the telcos would gradually forget IPTV for video and provide voice on mobile and video on their own DTH platform.

When asked by Indiantelevision.com on whether multi-system operators (MSOs), cable operators and broadcasters could synergise their core competencies and forge new revenue models, Krishnan said: "Traditionally they have been enemies, but in the emerging field, who knows… a really clever MSO and a really clever broadcaster could do business together on IPTV.

Changing the meaning of IPTV to 'interactive personalised TV' to give it more clarity of meaning, Alcatel-Lucent South Asia chief marketing officer A Sethuraman confirmed that the figures were really huge.

"The television market is worth Rs 200 billion and in the next three years, it is expected to be Rs 500 billion. The market projections say that 28 per cent of this could migrate to IPTV. So this is a high potential market," Sethuraman said.

The key challenges, Sethuraman held, were regulatory hurdles, infrastructure and power supply, along with keeping a low entry level pice.

NDS business development head (India) Sanjeev Fernandez said that while the market for IPTV was huge, the most vital issue would be piracy.

"Broadcasters are paranoid about piracy. Though it cannot be eliminated, it can be vastly controlled," said Fernandez.

Fernandez said that globally it was seen that interactivity could quadruple revenues, but added that the business models would only emerge with costs coming down.