BANGALORE, INDIA: IPTV, a niche technology, landed with much expectation is opening its arm slowly in India. According to the latest reports from IDC, the number of IPTV subscribers is likely to reach 966,000 by 2011 at a CAGR of 156.8 percent.

In an interaction with Abhigna N. G. of CIOL, Peter Papaioannou, operations director, video and cable solutions group, Cisco Systems Asia Pacific, throws light on how Cisco's IPTV plays a major role in offering quality services to valued customers. Excerpts:

CIOL: What Cisco is doing in the IPTV space in India?

Peter Papaioannou: Globally, the IPTV phenomenon has gained immense popularity. According to Infonetics Research, service providers globally spent $304 million on IPTV-related services infrastructure in 2004, and this is likely to grow to almost $4.5 billion in 2009.

It predicts that worldwide IPTV service revenue will skyrocket to over $44 billion in 2009 and also notes that subscriber growth is strong in all regions, while Asia Pacific is leading the way. This is thanks largely to the faster forms of DSL, like VDSL and ADSL2/2+, which are stimulating subscriber growth.

In India, as per IDC, the number of subscribers is likely to reach 966,000 subscribers by 2011 at a CAGR of 156.8 percent during the 2006-2011. IDC further expects 15.9 percent of all residential broadband subscribers in India to use IPTV by the end of 2011, up from less than 1 percent of all broadband subscribers in 2006. India currently has around 65 million cable and satellite homes.

From the consumer’s perspective, IPTV allows the user to experience digital quality TV with an added advantage of being a ‘pay-per-view’ service. Consumers can expect services such as video on demand, videoconferencing and interactive TV – pause, fast forward and rewind live TV or recorded content stored on the service provider’s remote servers. Therefore, all three parameters – comfort, cost and quality – are taken care of.

The service provider can effectively utilize the opportunity to add on to their revenue stream. In short, IPTV offers a win-win situation for both the operator and the customer.

CIOL: What are the services that IPTV offers to enhance the TV viewing experience?

PP: IPTV will bring services such as on-demand video content and network-based DVRs (digital video recorders). Using DVRs, the content is potentially stored on the network and streamed to your device. The content, which is typically available in streaming media format on the Internet, will be available for viewing on the television.

IPTV will also bring about the integration of video streaming with conferencing capability, and interactive TV applications, which will provide the user with a much richer experience than they have today.

The brands of the future will be network brands and service brands. They provide an opportunity to service providers, and the bundled brand becomes synonymous with the level of entertainment that consumers consume.

IPTV will deliver a different type of content from what we view on TV today. Content will be interactive and the clicking functionality offers viewer added features, which bring a differentiated experience for the end user.