IPTV which, just a few years ago, was a geek’s mad idea of convergence, is today a real added-value service in most European countries. It is becoming a full part of the media environment and gaining more adepts with every day that passes. A study of Forrester Research predicts that by 2017, 25% of fibre subscribers will also subscribe to IPTV.

After this quick phase of early adoption, the competitive edge is moving from the technology side to the business one. Today, with even more demanding customers, the main challenge of the industry’s professionals is to improve the quality of their service by improving their infrastructure and scaling up their deployment.

The first who saw the benefits of this service is the telecommunications industry. After an unfriendly start of the decade that saw most incumbent operators lose their monopoly position and market shares to new players and a dramatical drop in margins due to a fierce competition, IPTV offered a considerable source of revenue streams with bundle offers combining voice and internet with TV services.
However, after a few years comfortable advance, the IPTV chessboard is again witnessing deep changes when cable and satellite operators started fighting back with their own triple-play offerings.

With innovation come also some major challenges. First, as the IP protocol confirming itself as “the protocol” for digital signalling, Europe think tankers are facing not only the challenge of the improvement of signal transmission through terrestrial methods, but also the integration of the different protocols used in Europe.
Then there is also the question of content and Access management. With the multitude of video formats and the nature of the IP protocol, IPTV platforms have been developed to support different video formats and contents. Although, there is still need for the integration of different media types.

In conclusions, the success of the IPTV service is conditional to a broader market penetration. The service providers will have to go mainstream by reaching millions of subscribers instead of the thousands actually. For that, they need to propose a service that is not only converging with other services but that is also attractive, with a rich content, interactive and that can be delivered across different platforms.