BTVision on track......but is the Broadband Web going to bypass IPTV?

New Media Age today reports on a BT Vision tie up with Viacom, following on from BBC worldwide - and a good collection of other content holders - however it has still to launch, and there does not (yet) appear to be a user driven beta service if you sign up.

We have played with pure Broadband TV (see our other MyPCTV posts ) and we feel that, even though it is crude today, it works, and there is a lot of development potential here. And the reason it works is that 4 Mb pipe from.....BT

Juxtapose this with Tape it Off the Internet (TIOTI), which started as a bootstrap a little more than a year ago and is already in beta test with end customer volunteers. It is a non Set Top Box service, using Bittorrent to go direct to the PC. TIOTI is not the only one of the emerging direct Video - to - Home services.

I wish the BT team well, an IPTV system is a big piece of work - but the Big Question now is, will the Unlaunched IPTV guys (elsewhere as well as in the UK) be able to cope with the rush of the Broadband TV services, which won't need a Set Top Box to work.

I was at a presentation by Annelise Berendt of Ovum this week, where she showed that IPTV growth in the UK would be interesting, but not spectacular. My instinct is that as well as this, non IPTV style services will be far larger than is "officially" estimated today.

The counter-argument is that of course, the PC is not used in the living room, and people won't connect PC's to the TV...but this is, in our view, something that may tip very fast because:

(i) Its probably untrue now anyway - circumstantial evidence is that a lot of people use laptops in the lounge now, and there are spare PC's in many households. Sure, these are often early adopters but that is all that is needed to kick off a shift in such an early market.

(ii) A lot of people now have modern TVs that can take PC screen output, and Christmas is coming.

(iii) Free works........Now TV in Hong Kong gives the STBs away ( allegedly because thet have such great customer data), but They seem to be the exception as a business model.

(iv) After YouTube's acquisition I suspect the funding for these plays will be coming in fast

Interesting Times.............