IPTV on the Move

A pair of reports released this week forecast IPTV subscriber and revenue growth for the next four years. Both Gartner and Research and Markets predict solid growth for IPTV by 2010.

The growth of IPTV will have implications for local advertising, as we’ve written about here, here and in a White Paper late last year. It will also represent vital competitive ground for the strategic bundling of voice, data, video and wireless — a battle that will increasingly heat up between cable companies and telcos.

This competition is currently being held back by legal issues, including telcos gaining the statewide franchise rights for television service. There are also cultural adoption, technical and logistical issues for IPTV service rollouts. This will represent a large battle ground for services in the coming years as many of these issues are hammered out, and local advertising will play a part in the ad models built around them. We’ll examine this further in an upcoming report on triple play.