IPTV Article of the Day

The Washington Post's Leslie Walker penned an interesting post-CES piece today about IPTV.

From the article:

No single company put everything together into a magical product at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, but you didn't need much imagination to connect the booths and see the Internet TV networks of the 21st century struggling to be born. The unmistakable theme was how video is moving over the Internet onto home televisions and mobile devices in ways that will finally allow consumers to talk back to their TVs, much as they have been interacting with Web sites for the past decade.

This is a point we have continually raised about the benefits IPTV will bring to consumer targeting and advertising. The interaction or pulling in of on-demand content will not only serve users in innovative ways, but will also give networks, service providers and advertisers invaluable, detailed information about what viewers want and exactly where they are. The inherent advantages of IP technologies over cable and satellite will allow this tracking—as they have done on the Web—as Walker pointed out (and as we have in the past).

This point she makes is also intriguing:

Basically, IPTV allows multiple layers of video, pictures and text to be mixed with video feeds in ways viewers can control with their remotes. It's the old interactive TV vision—point your remote at an actress on screen and up comes her name, prior credits and perhaps a "buy me" button for her blue sequined dress.

The big question is: How will all the moving parts come together, such as content creation and aggregation, hardware integration, service providers, monetization strategies, and advertising sales channels (or perhaps self provisioning).

An interesting read and a primer for many IPTV issues we'll raise at the upcoming Drilling Down on Local conference.