Let us see the global perspective of IPTV service. Verizon with FiOS and AT&T with uVerse are capturing market based on IPTV technology in USA. While in Europe, France telecom is leading the pack with over 2.5 million subscribers. Followed by operators such as KPN in Dutch land, BT in UK, Tiscali in UK, and Telia Sonera in Sweden are quite active. In Asia Pacific, Chunghwa Telecom, China Telecom, Korea Telecom are key service providers in this space. While in our country operators such as Bharti Airtel, MTNL and BSNL have rolled out IPTV services in major metros.

Customer Expectations from IPTV. Always on and always available. Do not want to miss glory moments of an event, better and consistent quality of viewing them round the clock, interactive services (can I surf net on TV or can I see TV on my computer or even on my mobile phone), on demand services (more personalized and interactive in nature which gives flexibility to customer of watching any program to his convenience and in his leisure time), and on-line resolution( do not send your engineer Fix it on-line from the network).

Opportunities of IPTV operators to meet customer expectations. Service providers are lying self healing and resilient network architecture to meet up customer expectation of always on and always available IPTV services. This is happening by introducing latest state of the art technologies such as RPR, IP MPLS in the core, and aggregation network. Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), also known as IEEE 802.17, is a standard designed for the optimized transport of data traffic over optical fiber ring networks. It is designed to provide the resilience found in SDH networks (50ms protection) but, instead of setting up circuit oriented connections it provides a packet based transmission in order to increase the efficiency of Ethernet and IP services.

RPR works on a concept of dual counter rotating rings called ringlets. These ringlets are set up by creating RPR stations at nodes where traffic is supposed to drop, per flow (a flow is the ingress and egress of data traffic). RPR uses MAC (Media Access Control protocol) messages to direct the traffic, which can use either ringlet of the ring. The avoidance of failed spans is accomplished by using one of two techniques known as steering and wrapping. Under steering if a node or span is broken all nodes are notified of a topology change and they re-route their traffic. In wrapping the traffic is looped back at the last node prior to the break and routed to the destination station.

All traffic on the ring is assigned a Class of Service (CoS) and the standard specifies three classes. Class A (or High) traffic is a pure CIR (Committed Information Rate) and is designed to support applications requiring low latency and jitter, such as IPTV and voice. Class C (or Low) is best effort traffic, utilizing whatever bandwidth is available such as Internet Access.

A new technology called MPLS-TP has emerged from IP-MPLS and provides benefits and features of both TDM and MPLS world.

Compared with IP/MPLS based networks, the MPLS-TP based PTN provides advantages by focusing on the transport domain, rather than attempting to also cover routing applications, MPLS-TP is a simpler approach than an equivalent IP/MPLS-based approach, TCO that is lower than IP/MPLS since it omits IP-oriented routing and control complexity, MPLS-TP supports OAM and protection/redundancy in each layer and connection-oriented approach with traditional protection schemes and transport-centric OAM tools that line up with established architectures.

Providing Quality of Experience to IPTV customer. View of each household from the backend to the customer premises to sort out any major or minor issues, transient issues at customer premises which impairs the viewing experience and customer delight, intermittent picture freezing, picture blockings, intermittent jitters, pixelization, channel zap time variation.

Interactive Services. The chart above depicts some of the applications such as VoD, TSTV, PPV, PVR getting interaction with IPTV subscribers. This use to be the path of the service providers in introducing phase wise manner video blended with internet world and then multimedia video.

However, the latest trends state the convergence of User Generated Content (UGC) on TV such as MySpace, YouTube, video Sharing, and interactive gaming on TV.

At the same time, service providers are challenged to deliver these innovative services to keep pace with a new generation of subscriber along with the quality of this content on TV platform, legal and regulatory compliance and apex involvement to monetize the same.

What is required to take IPTV to next paradigm? Availability of niche content to IPTV platform and utilizing the unique proposition of IPTV platform in distributing the content to subscriber as per his wish and as per his convenience, more interactive games and partner ecosystem to offer these games in a cost competitive scenario, customer education and awareness programs, more interactive application solutions providers, and local loop unbundling in India for higher penetration and coverage.