IPTV is a perfectly awful, sophomoric joke inspiring moniker and it needs new name. If that wasn’t already clear from the fact that virtually no operator lets the acronym get within the last 100 meters of it marketing–heck you still can find VoIP as the awe inspiring label among some providers–the fact hit home during this week’s Cable-Tec Expo in Denver. Maybe it was the 16 inches or so of snow that was dumped on the area as the event was getting started, but a surprisingly large portion of this very traditional cable show was dedicated to figuring out how cable operators should migrate their video infrastructure to all-IP. This trend will be the focus of a future (shameless plug alert) Yankee Group report in part because it offers significant opportunity and potential for chaos among both operators and vendors.
But what to do about that name? Several vendors I spoke with at the show were hesitant to even verbalize what cable considers a four letter word. One VP of marketing even flat out said “everybody hates IPTV” while the acronym stood in two foot high letters as a prominent part of his booth. A handful of vendors have started pasting IPTV with somewhat chunkier sobriquets such as “broadband video” and “video over IP.”
A few suggested that the real issue is IPTV’s strong brand identified with telcos. Cable operators would prefer giving away free HBO for life to adopting something that came out of the “evil empire” as one operator called all telcos.
The reality however is that as unappetizing as it may be for vendors and operators alike, the name is likely to stick around for some time. Part of the reason is that there isn’t a significant difference between the gear that brings IPTV to cable and telcos. The path to an all-IP network it turns out leads to multiple networks that look eerily similar.