IPTV / Telco TV

Yahoo! and Intel said Wednesday they hope to solve the problem of how to bring the Internet to your television by serving up bite-sized snippets--dubbed widgets--rather than the whole Internet.

From a standard television remote, FiOS subscribers can use Veveo's video search technology to discover relevant video content from across Verizon's linear channels, video-on-demand, and DVR content.

While Many Have Rung Its Death Knell, the Pendulum Is Swinging Back to TV.

It's still unclear if the digital home will be a consumer-controlled environment or a carrier-controlled one.

AT&T and its MediaFLO USA subsidiary is launching the AT&T Mobile TV with FLO service in 58 markets beginning this week. The new service broadcasts programming live and in color onto mobile phones.

USTelematics is skipping the satellites that KVH Industries and Sirius Backseat TV rely upon and betting on WiMax wireless technology to bring TV to your car. It will deliver IPTV to its Voyager in-car entertainment systems and has announced a "mobilecast" program called 4VDO that will deliver broadcast and video programming.

Just because consumers are currently watching free, short-form video does not necessarily indicate there is a viable business model to support viewing of traditional TV content online. Most of the evidence available suggests that online video content is supplementing and complimenting traditional TV content and viewing habits rather than replacing or supplanting them.

According to the Yankee Research Group, telco-provided IPTV is gaining momentum. Yankee predicts that by 2011, 9 million Americans will get their TV that way. That's still only one-seventh of what cable draws, and a third of the satellite base -- but slowly but surely, the telcos are making inroads.

It hasn't happened yet, but full-blown convergence between television and the Internet is on the way. "The trend toward greater video convergence is being driven by factors such as broadband, digital TV and, ironically, the fragmentation of the audience," says eMarketer's David Hallerman. "Fragmentation is forcing traditional television players, the networks and studios, to reach out where the audience lives."

TV is big business, as Verizon realizes, and the company is pouring $23 billion into FiOS fiber-optic lines to deliver it to homes. The service initially had been conceived to upgrade its customers' Internet service and, indeed, there are 1.5 million FiOS Internet customers. Verizon hooks up 3,425 new FiOS TV customers each business day and already calls itself the nation's 10th-largest cable company - a threat to Comcast's core franchise of 24 million subscribers.