Making TV-over-Broadband A Reality.

The broadband market has become extremely contentious, as telecommunications service providers, in a race for their very survival, face powerful competition from powerful competitors offering multiple bundled services. In spite of this threat, opportunities for tremendous revenue growth from the delivery of new TV-based services also exist. With the proper mix of digital services, a service provider can meet the challenges of this market and emerge with substantial gains in subscribers and increased loyalty from existing customers, according to a newly released report from Parks Associates, Delivering Interactive Media to the Home ( http://www.parksassociates.com/reports&services/reports/tocs/interactive_media.htm ). This report identifies both the threats and opportunities in these ventures and provides a thorough roadmap to enable a broadband service provider to compete successfully in this new marketplace.

Communications networks around the world are going digital all the way to the home, making it possible for a single service provider to offer entertainment, information, and telecommunications services to residential subscribers. In the United States, the cable television industry has been busy introducing new revenue-generating services, including broadband data, video-on-demand, interactive TV, and even voice telephony, in order to recover its massive infrastructure investments. What’s more, Parks Associates’ latest consumer research, Bundled Services and Residential Gateways ( http://www.parksassociates.com/reports&services/multiclientstudies/bundledserv_resgate/resgateway.html ), indicates that U.S. households are quite receptive to the bundling of traditional and new communications and entertainment services from a single provider.

However, some providers will be on the losing side of this equation as cable companies, satellite providers, telcos, public utilities, and energy service providers are all hoping to push services that will attract new customers and appease their current base of subscribers. With the cable TV industry expanding at a furious pace, and public utilities delivering TV and multimedia services via fiber-to-the-home, telcos run the risk of being left behind if they continue to deploy DSL data service as an end in itself. However, if they can combine advanced services such as interactive TV with their core strengths in delivering voice and data, telcos can not only defend their traditional customer base, but also win new customers.

“Telcos and their suppliers have been talking about video for many years, but for technological, bandwidth, and cultural reasons, telco-based video has never happened,” said Steven Hawley, contributing analyst and author of Delivering Interactive Media to the Home. “Now their business models and technologies have aligned in such a way that video will help them defend against the loss of one of their most valuable assets, the residential telephone subscriber.”

Rather than predicting the continued growth of broadband, now a foregone conclusion, Delivering Interactive Media to the Home focuses on the delivery of TV over broadband digital networks and analyzes the entire end-to-end digital delivery ecosystem that makes it possible for a telco, a public utility company, or any other broadband network provider to compete effectively. Elements of this end-to-end delivery ecosystem include interactive television applications and platforms, middleware, content processing and encoder systems, video servers, access networks, and set-top boxes..

For more information at http://www.parksassociates.com