IPTV In The United States 

 The future of media as we already know it is being delivered to us via the Internet. Podcasting changed the way many people looked at how people view the Internet for delivering content to the mainstream. When iTunes added podcasting support, we saw a boom in podcasting and now there is a great variety of shows. Podcasting isn’t fully mainstream yet, but most people who would listen to a podcast already know what one is.

The next big step is Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). China is at the forefront of IPTV, they have a big infrastructure, and the bandwidth to handle the streaming video. With services such as pplive, mysee, and SopCast, you can watch hundreds of channels for free. These services are using peer-to-peer technology to power the networks, in fact, most use Bittorrent!
Some of the channels on these networks are ESPN, HBO, Cinemax, USA, MTV, Discovery Channel, and the National Geographic channel. This is great, because you normally have to pay extra on your cable bill for the listed channels.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, no, not so much since I do not speak Chinese, which brings up my point. The fact that NO ONE is doing this in the United States is just plain stupid. If there is a market for podcasting, then wouldn’t there be a market for streaming video? AOL Radio has had a huge success with their radio network; wouldn’t this be the case for video?

The fact that many people in the US do not have broadband is a factor. Over 70% have “broadband”, but most people who have “broadband” have the cheapest DSL or Cable plan that have speeds around 512kbps, which, by FCC standards, is in fact, not broadband. China can have these great IPTV networks because they have the bandwidth, like I previously stated. For $100, in the US, you could maybe get 6Mbps download speeds. In China, you could get 1Gbps download speed for the same price!

Steve Jobs reported in his keynote at the 2006 MacWorld conference that the iTunes music store had sold over 8 million video downloads since its launch in October. Most videos in the iTunes music store sell for $1.99 each. That’s $15,920,000 in less than six months!

There defiantly is a market for IPTV, so who will deliver IPTV in the United States? Who else? Google Video. Google is, what I believe, the only company that can secure this role. They already have CBS, NBA, and ESPN signed up for their download service, and we already know that they’ve been streaming user-submitted video for over a year now. TV-al-la-carte is a great idea, and many people would love to download the latest episodes of their favorite shows. Broadcast TV is not dead, however. The major networks are allowing this for now, because they still have the majority of people watching their shows on standards televisions. The $1.99 that is made from a video download is not paying for much, since the costs get swallowed up by Apple’s commission fee and bandwidth costs. The number one thing that is paying for shows is advertising. On broadcast television, you have to watch their advertisements. If broadcast television was replaced with al-la-carte television, the prices would become much higher than anyone would be willing to pay for just one episode.

This is where Google comes in. The leader of online advertising, Google can secure the spot easily for the IPTV provider. Imagine Adsense in video, where your commercials are relative to the show you are watching, a cooking show. Today’s show is about how to make an authentic Mexican dinner. During the commercial, you see advertisements for local Mexican restaurants, and the latest sale on jalapenos at the nearest market. Local broadcasters have always had local advertisements, but no one has ever had a system of relative, local marketing like Google has. Who wouldn’t jump at an opportunity like this? The advertisers would choose Google, because they will better reach their target audience without more expense, and the networks would choose Google because that’s where the advertisers are. So, maybe Google is the IPTV provider that the US has been waiting for, we will have to see how it all unfolds.

One other thing to be on the look out for is a company called Participatory Culture Foundation. PCF created the wonderful Broadcast Machine software, which is an easy to use Bittorrent tracker system designed with distributing video in mind. PCF has developed a new program called DTV. DTV is not only an open source Bittorrent client, it also ties in with Broadcast Machine to create Bittorrent channels. These “channels” are not what is traditionally considered as channels in broadcasting terms, which would be a channel streaming video live, over the air waves or over IP. These channels are in fact just about the same as a video podcast. Each site that uses the Broadcast Machine software is a channel. In DTV, you can browse the channel guide to find information on a certain channel, download video, and auto-download video from the channel. This is, in my opinion, better than iTunes because it uses Bittorrent, you can subscribe to any video cast (even if it’s not a BM channel), and its channel guide is way better than iTunes. There is a Mac client available for download now, with Windows and Linux versions coming soon.

The future of IPTV in the United States can be excellent if we beef up or infrastructure, be willing to transcend to IPTV, and grasp this new technology to make it mainstream. This is 2006, let’s start acting like it.