IPTV's biggest challenge

IPTV's biggest challenge is Growing the market. Telephony mag gets it right with this article: "Virtually every video customer a telco wins will come at the expense of either cable or satellite," becuz the TV market is static. "Even DTV has faced some challenges in growth but could be positioned to be a leader in HDTV." “With telephony [the service telcos are defending with their video services] one of the things that fools everyone is that you have more than 100% penetration with cell phones... If you look at the figures, somewhere around 85% of households can be accounted for with some type of pay TV. Unless you can come up with a scenario that is very improbable at this point, the most likely case is people won't subscribe to more than one [video service].” "Bells should keep satellite friends despite slowing growth. “If there's one group you don't want to push into broadband, it's the satellite guys,” Schnee said."

BST Net Adds of DTV Customers Q105 = 113,000 Q205 = 80,000 Q305 = 66,000 Q405 = 63,000 Source: BellSouth

Telephony mag states, "For anyone doubting the ability of communications service providers to capture market share from cable, the entertainment services market-share leader, they need look no farther than DBS." It's a good read: InFocus: How to compete against DBS and cable