Looking for Trends

Everyone wants to know about trends. Where we're headed, why and how they'll affect us personally and professionally. In the IP space, looking for trends can be dicey. Nevertheless, a gaggle of top executives from a cross-section of IP-related industries gathered recently at the IP Trend Summit in San Francisco, put on by IMS Research, to discuss what's on the IP horizon. Here's what they came up with, according to Ian Weightman of IMS.

Careful consideration of architectural strategy prior to deployment is essential to ensuring adequate capacity and QoS for future IPTV deployments. Translation: better have an architectural clue.

The unlimited footprint of the Internet is its biggest advantage, and will allow for continued experimentation with new services.

Compression will be the key for IPTV providers competing with cable, with MPEG-4 viewed as an enabler for multiple video streams, with at least one being HD.

The Internet is likely to have a a much larger impact on TV than TV will have on Internet backbones.
There is vastly more storage than transmission capacity, and this is likely to continue.
Together with the the requirements of mobility, and the need to satisfy human desires for convenience and instant gratification, this is likely to induce a migration towards a store-and-replay model, away from the current real-time streaming model of the broadcast world.
Further,HDTV may finally get a chance to come into widespread use.
Video is likely to play an increasing role, taking over as a major driver of traffic growth from music (which got a large boost from
Napster).

Cable operators will not stand still as IPTV grows, and will eventually get into IPTV themselves if the telcos start using interactivity as a differentiator. Few telcos understand the TV business, and that will hold them back.

Some believe the set-top box is the natural candidate to become the whole home video server. But no initiative has been taken to make all the bits needed to make the STB-as-media-gateway concept work together.

However, this video is likely to be in the form of file transfers, not streaming real time traffic.
The basic argument is that video will follow the example of Napster (or MP3, to be more precise), which is
delivered primarily as files for local storage and replay, and not in streaming form.
This local storage has several advantages.
It can be deployed easily (no need to wait for the whole Internet to be upgraded to provide high quality transmission). It also allows for
faster than real time transmission when networks acquire sufficient bandwidth.
(This will allow for sampling and for easy transfer to portable storage units.)

VOD usage is growing at the expense of traditional television, and on-demand content is a strong potential differentiator and churn-reducer. With the IP VOD industry offering DVDs, gaming, and local content on demand, traditional TV usage will continue to erode.

The broadcast model, in which people have to adjust their schedules to fit those set by network executives was an
unnatural one, forced by the limitations of the available technology.
The popularity of video tape rentals showed that people preferred flexibility.
Similarly, when cable TV operators chose to offer more channels as opposed to higher resolution channels, they were
presumably responding to what they saw as their customers' desires for variety.

The Internet will offer even more flexibility.

No real jaw-dropping surprises, but the trend towards IPTV and on-demand services is unmistakable. This will get real interesting.