July 20-21, 2005
Kempinski Hotel, Beijing

In its January issue of its FieldCall Newsletter, ChinaNex states: "IPTV will become a flagship application on China Telecom's Vnet this year. The nation's largest fixed line operator will soon begin a national marketing campaign to promote IPTV in all major cities. With IPTV broadband users can watch edited TV programs or VOD on PC or through set-top box. China Telecom has launched a commercial IPTV pilot in Shanghai with Shanghai Media Group (SMG), a local cable TV operator. Preliminary results show video will become "the most attractive" service for broadband users. One estimate puts IPTV users to 100 million by 2008 and 40 billion yuan (US$4.8 billion) in revenue."

On July 20-21, 2005, the 2nd annual China Broadband Triple Play/IP-TV Forum will bring the triple play industry together to discuss the current state of technology, content, services, market and regulatory affairs. Attendees will be carriers, broadband service providers, content licensors and distributors, telecom regulators, ISPs and WISPs, telecom research institutes, systems/network integrators, network operators, systems vendors, video solution providers, application developers, industry analysts, etc.

Among others, the following topics will be addressed at the forum:

• Definition of IP-TV and the service concept
• Market demand and trends for triple play/IPTV
• Integration strategy
• Business drivers for telcos to offer triple play services.
• Consideration for entering the video distribution business and the strategies for ensuring your venture becomes profitable.
• What content consumers want from broadband and how you can tailor your programming to meet their demand.
• Approaches other telcos have taken to secure content deals.
• Infrastructure upgrades needed to support current and future services.
• Regulatory landscape regarding telco TV and how to work around the legal framework using models such as franchising, licensing and alliances with broadcasters and content producers.
• Who to partner with for content and how to effectively distribute content across to customers.
• Approaches to content protection and available technologies
• Bandwidth saving compression tools.
• Upgrades for the access network.
• Investment required in the backhaul part of your network, the economics of triple play, OPEX, CAPEX, cost recovery and ROI.
• End-to-end triple play solutions from leading industry vendors.
• Role of carrier grade products to implement and integrate video/television as part of your service.
• Adding Electronic Programming Guides (EPG) functions and Video on Demand (VoD) features to existing IPTV services Technical considerations and challenges for deploying IP-TV application
• Transport and access network implementation issues
• Triple play applications - implications on the network
• Access to media content through licensing, procuring and partnerships
• Selection criteria for head-end servers for IP-TV, VoD, System Management, Middleware, CPE management
• Selection criteria for CPE for broadband termination and triple play applications
• Selection criteria for CPE for media termination (set-top box)
• Positioning, differentiating, bundling, packaging, pricing and marketing of voice, data and video services
• Value added applications for the triple play environment-network games, e-commerce, instant messaging, video telephony Convergence of triple play mobile applications

For more information, click here.