I WANT MY INTERNET TV
After long playing second fiddle to broadcast television, internet TV looks set to take a leading role. A new report from market watchers iSuppli predicts that the market for internet TV will grow from $423 million in 2006 to $5.8 billion by 2011. A rapidly growing number of consumer devices are now connected to the internet and nearly two-thirds of consumers want their televisions to join them.
This revolution in TV viewing habits will transform video on the internet, which currently is dominated by news content consumed in short segments on PC screens.
According to iSuppli’s report, connecting TVs to the internet will drive sports and entertainment onto video streams making them the largest revenue generator for internet TV by 2009. It predicts that the bandwidth required for internet TV will grow by over 44 times from 2006 to 2011 and that the market will be dominated by North America and Europe throughout the whole period.
Europeans are already keen consumers of internet TV according to a separate study by StrategyOne. It found that 45% of consumers across the continent were already watching TV online. The French were the most prolific viewers at 59%, followed by Italian and the British.
But a number of significant technical challenges are still to be overcome before the internet becomes the main television distribution channel.
One of the biggest problems is that the web does not have the same quality of service for television viewing.
For a start, video distribution over the internet will need to cope with a content using a plethora of codecs and digital rights management schemes. These fragmented approaches make designing a simple internet TV device an engineer’s headache.
Despite these problems the internet promises to be the world’s most important video distribution platform. Existing video network operators will need to work out how they can use it to reach their consumers, while fighting off new competitive threats from a whole range of consumer portals and internet companies.