By Alexander Cameron, Managing Director, Digital TX Ltd.

Time and time again, industry talk comes back to what the one "killer app" will be for IPTV as a platform. Most assume it will be video on-demand, as the historical business case has always rested on the fact that consumers love being able to have video whenever they want it, and subsequently rack up enough in their bills to justify the expense of rolling it out. The truth is IPTV has far more killer apps than that, just as it has share of things that should never raise their ugly heads above the proverbial parapet. In this article we explore some of things that as a next-generation technology IPTV can offer that no other platform can come close to. And unfortunately, we also touch on the blacklist of horror that anyone caught being enthused about would need to be taken out and shot for.

Set-top boxes designed for ladies
This may seem like an odd point to make in the context of consumer electronics and technical entertainment services, but the fact is that 50% of a typical IPTV audience is just not being catered for when it comes to what you actually get in your living room. Men will buy anything that looks and sounds powerful (read: silver chrome casing with blue lights), whereas women are so much more discerning and typically not remotely interested in technology. If you've ever seen a woman navigating her way through a clothes shop you'll notice the feel of things available in store is all important. Apple realised this and conquered the world with the iPod – it feels beautiful to the touch, and even includes a mirror on the back to do your make-up. Get the girls with a beautiful, user-friendly ornament and you have a winner, as the guys are already sold.

Simple, standardised remote control
Sky deserve credit for being smart when it comes to putting a platform together and specifying their standard chunky remote control for all set-top boxes. They are, strangely enough, last on most people's lists despite being the one crucial link between the viewer and the TV service. Who even really knows what 80% of the buttons actually do? How many do you truly need to operate the TV? Probably far fewer than you imagine. The secret here is to make it like a playboy bunny – good looking and incredibly simple. Less is definitely more. Stick to on/off, up/down/left/right, select and maybe a few other optional ones for good measure.

Customisable TV menus and screens
Most platform operators make an undignified scramble to protect their brands with walled gardens and strict graphic design rules. Viewers should be able to install different EPG 'skins' or 'themes' and add simple 'plug-ins' to their TV navigation system (e.g. "Delete this channel", or "N mins until your program starts") just as with popular PC media player programs, such as Windows Media Player, Songbird, Winamp or Firefox. The default 'start screen' on most IPTV browsers, which is usually just a normal web page URL (e.g. an HTML page, either static text or dynamically generated by a server-side technology such as ASP, PHP or JSP), should be able to be set to any internet address, where savvy viewers could direct it to their own PC web server or external web-space.

10,000+ Unlimited TV channels
Broadcasting a TV signal that gets featured on the Sky menu is the cheapest way to produce a TV channel in the UK, but it costs over £100k per Mbit and is limited to the footprint of the Astra and Eutelsat satellite networks. Using IP and internet technologies to transmit video makes geography essentially irrelevant, and the distribution cost with it. Cable and terrestrial networks have a finite capacity which makes them even more expensive, but even Sky's comparatively high volume is limited to service ID numbering schemes and transponder space. With the use of IPv6 (and to some extent IPv4), we have the ability to cost-effectively relay tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of individual multicast TV channels from any part of the world to the rest. Mongolia's best channels can be resold in Peru, and Gambia's leading broadcasters can offer pay-per view to New Zealand.

Real-time fast forward
The weakness of the extremely popular Sky+ PVR (and its alternatives, such as provided by Telewest) is that it can only allow a viewer to pause and rewind, whereas true video on-demand allows full VCR-like functionality over the network, which includes fast-forward (or 'seek'). Fast-forward allows a viewer to skip ads, scan past what they've seen before and flick through material in a very efficient way. This does however put an additional strain on video servers, but technology is now emerging that gives significant performance increases to counterbalance this.

DVD features for all VoD movies
The easiest (and some might say, only) way to promote adoption of a new technology or commercial proposition is to clearly demonstrate that it has increased value over what it is replacing. Evidence from many telcos across the world (including our own KIT and Homechoice) is that people watch VoD movies as a last resort because they associate it with having to pay. The other, less mentioned reason for that failure to adopt is that VoD is perceived to be a step down from DVD, that is to say, less value than it. DVD gives you menus, chapters, subtitles, languages, special features and more, whereas a VoD movie is just screening the main title. Operators should offer video on-demand with full DVD functionality as "DVD without the disc", and true internet connectivity that is lacking on a normal DVD player.

Viral web content on your TV
IP set-top boxes are connected to the internet and effectively work as any normal browser, like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox. Most popular products tend to be installed with a mark-up language-based browser like Ant Galio, Espial Evo/Escape or Opera for reading menus and screens built in X/HTML, Javascript and CSS. Optionally, they can also have Macromedia Flash 6 built in, even though it tends to consume resources heavily. But the best part is that they also have dedicated semiconductor hardware built in that eats video for breakfast, unlike a PC which does everything in software and chokes. This browser-based environment means content developers can produce flash and shockwave animations and web movies to be included for watching on your TV. Funny viral movies are no longer stupidly large email attachments – they can be on your TV for all of the family.

Your very own TV channel
The ubiquity of broadband connections means that anyone should be able to broadcast out a live video stream from their own house or office as IP multicast to their ISP, who can make it globally accessible to anyone all over the world. This could be the output of a video camera (yes porn lovers, the world just got kinkier) or a looping playlist of home video footage (the free VLC player is a great way to do this at very low cost). Local football clubs should be able to produce their own sports channel, councils their own 'name and shame' ASBO update, charities their own local campaigns and local businesses advertising for their services, solely through a broadband DSL line.

View any CCTV camera in the UK
Homechoice do tend to get a kicking, but they have been first to market with this fabulous idea. In the times of our surveillance society, why shouldn't we all be able to watch the CCTV that records us every day? Estimates for the number of cameras in the whole of the UK (including private premises) have been put as high as 4 million, with up to 500,000 just in the capital and 9000 to be on the underground alone. These cameras already produce half-resolution MPEG-4 footage as it is, and should be easily configurable to multicast onto public network backbones. Combine that with Google Maps, localised services and the crime-fighting abilities of anyone across the country being able to record footage at any time and fans of reality TV would be delighted – something more boring than 'The Salon'.

Highly-localised services
DSL is uniquely useful as it is must be installed on a telephone line, which is mapped geographically to an exchange area, green street cabinet sub-loop and end-user premises, with its postcode and customer information. That means every transaction made between the operator's head-end and the viewer's set-top box can be intelligent, as opposed to the random scattering of typical broadcast TV. Set-top boxes should ideally ship with not just serial numbers and viewing cards, but the postcodes of the customers who have ordered them, so this information can help content developers to produce highly targeted and localised services that are massively more compelling than their precedents, such as "Find My Nearest....", and the likes of GPS and mobile integration (imagine getting directions to a dinner party on your phone from someone's set-top box - they both speak IP). As the RIAA have shown with their psychotic litigation spree, IP addresses can be geographically resolved by ISPs to individual premises and their customer accounts, which is now being used by content owners like the BBC to restrict viewing of material to certain countries.

Mapping and direction services
Google Maps' public API has generated huge levels of innovation amongst developers on the internet, and provided with open access to an IPTV platform, should be able to do the same for TV. Viewers should be able to very simply enter postcodes to destinations through their remote control (like on a mobile phone keypad, as described later) and see maps of locations on their TV screen, or directions to them using interactivity to explain a route. This type of application, like many others, should be able to be invoked by a broadcasters or operator as part of a normal video broadcast (e.g. "press X to see a map of where this happened/where your nearest store is…").

VoIP integration
No self-respecting 'triple play' operator should be without some form of IP telephony control through the TV, as many are now experimenting with. VoIP uses the same type of transit as IPTV, which means it works over the same network and connection, and can talk to a set-top box quite easily. Whether you have a PBX in your home (like the excellent free Asterisk@Home package) or subscribe to an upstream SIP/Softswitch provider like Vonage and Sipgate, a TV can offer a very simple means to use your telephone in new and exciting ways as its just an IP system that can talk easily to asset-top box with an XML APU or web interface. Get visual caller display on your TV screen when someone is calling in or waiting, see the other person on their 3G video phone, listen to voicemails by browsing them like email, snoop or conference on others' calls, read SMS and MMS messages, interact with IVR applications, or change simple admin settings with your remote control.

Browse movies, photos and music on your home network
Many device manufacturers offer both wired and wireless media player units that plug into your TV via Scart cable and let you watch films, browse photos and listen to music away from your PC. Offering the same on a set-top box is relatively easy, assuming you have a reliable piece of software installed on the PC (simple media server) that will be able to talk to it in a way it understands. The network should be abstracted – devices able to log onto a network with DHCP and also use internet connectivity can connect to PCs and other set-top boxes on a home LAN, without needing to be in 2 separate units. A set-top box should also be able to output a copy of the TV stream it is receiving and displaying as multicast onto the network it is part of, so other devices can reproduce the same TV picture in parallel.

Simple P2P network messaging
Being part of a community and interacting with others is the compelling factor that drives people to revisit social networking sites and keep using communication technology. Set-top boxes are just simple computers that offer very simple software applications that enable people to do the same, but in a considerably more primitive way. Applications need to be able to invoke a simple generic messaging system that allows the direct sending and receiving of simple data between 2 devices with separate IP addresses – such as photos, very simple text messages and themes. Instant messaging, or other text-intensive services are too much in a TV environment, but the ability to communicate small pieces of information is extremely important.

Loyalty reward schemes
Supermarkets operate loyalty cards with amazing results – the great British love of a bargain is just too much to resist for most people, even if it means giving up information on what they buy to everyone and his dog. Even Sky have tinkered with the idea, but like with others' attempts, all the experiments tended to require a physical card or tedious operating procedure. IPTV systems can implicitly identify who you are, and like in most hotel entertainment systems, can record almost everything you do if needed. Viewers should be rewarded for everything they do on an IPTV system – every transaction they take part in should be registered and credited against their subscription account by either the platform operator or third party content developers (via exposed API), be it viewing movies, listening to music, ordering accessories, sending messages, submitting photos, taking part in multiplayer games, using applications or just looking through content.

Music Recommendation
The popularity of the latest software applications that help people to discover new music they would like is reaching epidemic proportions, with very good reason. Software like the incredibly fantastic Pandora.com (based on the Music Genome Project and written in Flash) actually understands what a song sounds like to the human ear and can suggest new artists that sound similar, with its natural cousin Last.fm offering the same through human voting & recommendation. Video Networks report that their music video playlisting service (that allows viewers to compile lists of their favourite music videos, fast forward through the selection and effectively create their own TV station/channel) is by far the most popular part of their entire VoD platform. Stim TV offers rapid video previewing of artists for the same purposes, and companies like Shazam enable the identification of music through mobile phones. Having the ability to create, vote on and share playlists of your favourite music is a proven powerful driver of video on-demand.

Photo sharing
Photographs on digital cameras tend to be JPEG variants, which can be displayed by PCs and set-top boxes alike – most IP set-top boxes and media players can easily handle displaying hundred of picture files very easily. The sensation known as Flickr has shown the world how the desire to pass photos around friend can be applied to the larger world with amazing success. Set-top boxes should be able to generate slide shows with background music from photos on the local home network (i.e. from a shared folder on a PC), from webspace or specialised IPTV photo sharing walled garden applications. One of the most fun applications would be to send an MMS picture message from your mobile phone so it appears on your TV screen (MMS messages are typically received by a gateway/mmsc that relays them to an internet server) as part of a blog collection, ready to be shared with all you friends and family.

Mobile-style text entry using the remote control
Sky spent many tens of millions of pounds finding out that people don't like interacting with their TVs in the same way as their PC. If they even get that far at all, as most people are still terrified of computers. Keyboards, as explained later, are ugly, expensive, unreliable and utterly useless for the TV environment. Despite the fact that we want a viewer to have to do as little as possible, limited text entry is important and the winning formula is to use a format that is familiar to everyone – the lettering notation on a mobile phone (i.e. the "2" key has "ABC" as its subset), and optionally T9 predictive text technology. People know how to write text messages with their thumbs, so doing it on a remote control is not a great leap to make. It won't work for essays, but it can aid the smaller tasks in a TV user interface that viewers would find easy to pick up.

Live, real-time personalised information
We've had Teletext and on-screen graphics for a very long time, but being a true 2-way internet-connected medium, IPTV takes information display to an entirely new level that leaves its predecessors standing. Creating menus and screens from web languages like HTML means we can dynamically generate content and update it in real-time, but broadcast can do that too, obviously. The difference with IPTV is that we can provide truly personalised information, based on a viewer's individual preferences and interests. That information can be anywhere (e.g. alongside or inside the video stream) and anything – sports scores and statistics, text messages from friends and family, stock market prices, billing information, notifications and reminders, IMDB and CDDB information for movies and music, flight and holiday offers and so much more. AJAX is being used for this recently in so-called "Web 2.0" software applications to great effect.

Video-centric multiplayer games
Go into any HMV or Virgin Megastore and you will see a whole range of the latest quiz DVDs the whole family can play, for example Trivial Pursuit. These generally can offer thousands of video clips and 1-frame MPEG slides that are weaved into a complex menu structure for several people in the same room to interact with. The great thing about these games in comparison to their interactive TV, PC and plain board counterparts is that they offer rich video animation as part of the experience, which is so much more compelling for the average viewer. The BBC have got the nearest to this functionality with their "Spooks" and murder mystery "red button" applications, and the response has shown they are hugely popular. IPTV allows us unlimited video on-demand over the network, which when stitched together with nano-payment, great gameplay and personalisation is an unbeatable proposition. We can build leagues and tournaments for teams in their own living room, or allow groups to play each other whenever they desire, house versus house, or even pub versus pub.

TiVo-style web access
The original and the first PVR to hit the market way ahead of its time, loved by geek and layperson alike, hated by advertisers and TV networks, has never truly been beaten for functionality. One of the most lauded features was the ability to program your TiVo remotely whilst at work in the office over the internet, like many other CPE devices, for example your home DSL router. Through a simple web admin panel, you could schedule recordings and adjust settings without even needing to be in the same country, let alone the same room. Sling Media have now taken this concept even further by creating a media device (the 'SlingBox') that can behave like a media server and stream your TV through your home broadband connection to you wherever you are in the world on virtually any device. So not only can you set it to record remotely, you can watch it once it's done. They call the technology 'place shifting'.

Fun entertainment accessories
People love to personalise what they own, to make it truly theirs. PCs in offices get the Comic Sans treatment, whilst machine at home have ridiculous backgrounds, outrageous colours and other little quirks to represent the many faces of the owner's personality. Being firmly in the grip of the commercial overlords, TV has never been able to offer this – until now, of course. Viewers should be able to send each other video greeting cards, MSN-style "winks" and animations, JPEG backgrounds for their start screens and even audio effects like incoming VoIP call ringtones. Serious hard-working men call it "chick crack" – the rest of us call it mindless fun and a great revenue generator.

The strength of IPTV is also its Achilles heel. Being connected to the internet and/or global IP backbone means unlimited content in so many forms – unlimited TV channels, unlimited movies, videos and music and software applications galore. Anyone should be able to develop and innovate content that can be viewed by an IP set-top box. IPTV is at its most powerful when it is unleashed as an open platform for everyone to participate in, not locked into a limited walled-garden environment controlled by a specific brand. That ability to extend and innovate differentiates it from its competitors and allows it to evolve as the audience's taste does. But the very first thing the marketing and PR departments of the big players will harp on about defensively will be a claim that the sheer amount of content available on IPTV platforms is difficult to find, confusing to use and of variable quality. The moral of the story is if you plan to use unlimited content as a selling point, you better had the world's easiest way of finding your way around it.

But the trouble is, how do we find our way around all that content? An EPG and a select button is just not enough anymore. Traditional TV has gives channels individual numbers and easy menu systems to navigate through them. Telephones use geographic dialling codes and individual number strings, and mobile phones use simple shortcodes. Web browsers and media software on a computer have shortcuts, links and address bars. As Sky have realised, IPTV currently has no accepted standard way to browse, discover and subscribe to new services. It's difficult to use URLs or protocol addresses like http://, numeric shortcodes do not convey what the service is (let alone the reported quality and/or popularity of its content) and text shortcodes (like a TV version of domain names) are limited. The immediate text entry-free method would be to have visual prompts on-screen inviting a viewer to subscribe to, or add a shortcut, a new service, in the same way current "press red"-style applications do today. Installing those "shortcuts" so they are ever-present on the TV guide means building an EPG menu system that is easy to navigate through, as screen real estate is highly limited on a TV.

The simple fact is whoever answers that problem will provide the de facto MO for all IPTV services that come after it, and that person will almost certainly become very rich indeed. Building an intelligent 'service manager' application requires a mixture of seamlessly intuitive user interface design and intelligence from back-end servers that store personalisation data. The natural and trusted way people communicate in everyday life is through recommending things to others and looking to see what is popular. The best known popularity algorithm is Google's search engine technology – links to websites are treated as "votes" or endorsements to the quality of the information they point to. Google "glues" the web together – it is what fills in the gap between viewing different websites, a structured and useful way to navigate through all the 600 billion pages on the internet before you bookmark them. You can't put a search engine on an EPG (very sloppy thinking), but what we do need is a mechanism for gluing those TV services together that a) does not confine us to a branded walled garden, b) requires little or no text entry, c) allows us to promote services over others, and d) keeps us in reach of the EPG at all times.

An important principle to bear in mind is that just because you can port anything to IPTV doesn't mean you should. Quality assurance (QA) is a very tricky game, as is parental content control, simply because with so much content it is very difficult to check every screen and video manually on a platform that is inherently open as its very nature. Many extremely powerful and appealing web applications just won't work on TV, or may work but not generate any money. The latter isn't so much of a worry when the software is on the net and not costing you hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in distribution costs, but still needs to be at the heart of any commercial service.

As The Usability Company say, If they can't use it, they won't use it. There is potential for very serious sin on an IPTV platform in terms of content authoring, so if you thought blinking text, flash intro movies and popup windows were bad, TV is 1000 times less tolerant of such evil. Its time to pick up your crucifix, garlic and holy water, take a deep breath and get ready to look horror directly in the face. Amongst the candidates for immediate euthanasia are problems like….

Don't get in the way of the TV
First and foremost, IPTV is about TV. As obvious as that may sound, it's not generally understood by a lot of content developers. Clutter isn't acceptable or even practical. That little box in the corner of the room is for video and awful reality shows, not cool software applications, as much as we love them. A PAL TV picture in the UK, despite always having "overscan", is 720 pixels wide by 576 pixels high before taking into account the so-called "safe area" where graphics can be placed, and has a tiny fraction of the colours of a PC monitor available to it. That's not a whole lot of room for anything. We're talking big, blocky graphics with simple gestures on the remote control. TV is about pictures, and text longer than 5 or so words is pointless and annoying. Look on any mainstream channel and you will see almost half the screen is already taken up by logos what the campaign for Logo Free TV identify as "branding, idents, emblems, DOGs and Bugs", to you and me, visual noise or "screenjunk". Just don't do it.

TV keyboards and typing
Bad, bad, bad idea. A TV is not a PC, and it never will be. Mass market viewers will never feel comfortable using a keyboard with a television, no matter how hard vendors protest. It just won't happen. It just sucks, pure and simple – it's either a TV or a PC, not anything in the middle. The devices themselves are hideously ugly (usually semi-transparent plastic), have the feel of cheap plastic, are insanely unreliable and cost too much for the benefit anyone derives from them. TVs aren't meant for text entry – who on earth is going to use a "contact us" style form on an IPTV screen instead of making a phone call? It's just too much hassle. Most broadcasters offering "web chat"-style services have been forced to get people to "write" in their chat messages by sending a text message. And that is the answer to this particular problem – avoid text entry at all costs, but use the remote control keypad like a mobile phone number pad for entering text if absolutely necessary.

Video conferencing through the TV
This is a favourite of conference exhibitors in the IPTV world everywhere, as it looks great to investors and directors board. But that's all it really is – a dreadful gimmick that only seems to have taken off in Asia. Most people are quite satisfied with a normal telephone for making telephone calls and just don't want or need to make video calls through their TV. First you need a tiny webcam-style camera in your lounge (a bit creepy) and are sitting least 8ft away from the screen so barely anyone can hear you. There is one very simple reasoning video calling hasn't taken off in the UK, and it's nothing to do with technology. It's because it's nice to be anonymous and invisible on the phone – no-one wants the other person to see them whilst they are talking. Conceptually speaking, the service fits well into an IPTV architecture, but in reality it just doesn't seem to work.

Websites on TV
There is no excuse whatsoever for this. Back in the dotcom days you could be forgiven for experimentation with it in the same way your parents could be forgiven for the weird things they did in the 1960s. Some hotels still offer this monstrosity for reasons unbeknown to the rest of us. Little more comment is needed as there is very little say its defence. Suffice to say that if you offer still think it's cool and want to offer this, you are truly beyond help.

Instant messaging
BT are the latest IPTV operator to want to include messaging technology in their set-top box feature portfolio. All the noise Skype and Google Talk have made around converged telephony and/or multiple-service communication products has convinced those in the higher echelons that it needs to be put in there as a killer application. Not so. Yet another example of a technology company (Microsoft) walking into an area they have limited or no experience in and don't understand (television), and then scratching their heads in wonder when no-one uses what they have built. Commercially, IM is incredibly popular (mostly in the under-30s) and technically speaking its relatively easy to integrate with other IP systems, for instance the open source IM server, Jabber, uses the XML-based standard XMPP for communication which can talk to Asterisk or any other type of messaging technology. But it all comes down to the problem of text-entry – it's not a computer. How exactly do you have an IM conversation when someone else wants to watch Eastenders?

T-Commerce
A definite sore spot for Sky, who made whole departments redundant at Osterley when their investment in it collapsed. We may laugh, but their nearest rivals didn't even get to the starting block. Entire business plans were drawn up on the belief the mass market would swamp electronic TV "stores" through browsing catalogues on their TV screen and paying with credit cards in the same way as they do on the internet. It didn't work then, and it won't work now – IPTV as a technology is not suddenly going to transform the UK market into an audience of mail order fiends. Shopping only seems to work on TV when it is intimately merged into the programming itself (e.g. auction channels such as BidUp TV and traditional teleshopping such as QVC). The other form of commerce that works well is premium-rate telephony (PRT) micro-payment, either through dialling a premium 090x number or sending text messages that cost several pounds a time.

URLs
These are how we access resources on the internet, be they for HTML, RSS or WML in the case of mobile phones or Sky Active. Text entry limits as discussed earlier give us a maximum of 10 characters that will be typed in using a remote control. The average URL in the form protocol/sub/domain/directory/page format just will not work as its clunky and tedious when put in the TV environment. If your IPTV service revolves around an embedded web browser (as most do) and you follow cable's lead in getting your users to type in addresses, you are staring into the abyss.

Banner advertising
Although advertising is the lifeblood of conventional broadcasting and is a central tenet of IPTV systems, banner advertising is a horror that must never see the light of day on a TV screen. Before anything else, its just awful interface design. There simply isn't space to put advertising on a normal PAL-sized screen when services need to be centred around broadcast video and placed amongst a large deal of screen space-padding to be accessible. Blinking, colour-soaked i-frame nested animated gifs are totally inappropriate for anywhere on an IPTV EPG, as are any other evil forms of product marketing, like pop-up/under screens, text links deliberately made to look like editorial (e.g. Google AdWords style). Advertising needs to be placed away from menus and screens so it does not devalue and/or detract viewers from their TV experience into more relevant and compelling places, such as TV programming, viral video material, EPG 'skins' or accessories.

Writing email through your TV
Email as a whole was never intended for TV as it's too text-intensive, whereas other types of messaging, particularly multimedia-based communication such as voicemail or MMS, are very much more adaptable. Yahoo and BT used to offer their email service through Sky Active, but nobody ever used it and it never made any money for anyone that justified keeping it alive. Yet again, the issue is assuming something that works on a PC will work on a TV, and that TV is a personal medium when it is usually watching by more than one person at a time. It starts out as a great idea but goes rapidly downhill in the practical stakes - the initial stumbling block is setting up the details of your mailbox, for example, your POP3 server (if of course you don't use Exchange or IMAP), and then keeping your information private from anyone else who might also use the TV, for which you will need to enter a password or pin. Assuming you are happy to scroll through your emails in their unfriendly formatting and not worry about being unable to view attachments, you may still have to brave replying. That entails having a keyboard. To cut it short, it only works if you do it Blackberry-style.

Executable files
What man creates, man can destroy. What is true of lock-picking is true of any computer system. Although this isn't such a problem in embedded environments like that of a set-top box (many of which run one of several different flavours of Linux), it is still a prominent and important principle as the Windows security nightmare can easily come true elsewhere with even the slightest lapse. Nothing accessed from an external network such as the internet should ever be executable on the device. There are many operators today whose EPG and security systems are based on downloading a zip file which is decompressed on the fly to provide personalised menu information. Only certain key systems components need to download program updates to execute with full permissions on the box – core device firmware, software-based conditional access clients and middleware upgrades. Viruses, worms and/or malware on a commercial TV platform are the stuff nightmares are made of.

Personal profiles
Homechoice has this ability, and on the surface it looks like a really great and innovative idea. Mum, dad and the kids all like different things and want to do things differently – parents can set parental restrictions, flatmates can organise their services according to their individual tastes and you can separate weekday from weekend viewing. But the trouble is that in reality, nobody can be bothered to do the setting up or switching – or rather, 95% of people can't be bothered. It's like gardening with napalm – overkill for the environment. When presented with 2 options, without fail human nature chooses the easier one. In this case, the easier option is just use the one profile in the same way you would with any other TV system that doesn't have the ability in the first place. Nice try, but no cigar.

It's very easy to forget how different a TV and a PC are when both are using the same technologies and can integrate easily. The fact you can repurpose web-based content for IPTV needs to be heavily tempered by considered judgement in discerning whether the application and/or content is itself even applicable to TV in the first place, As always, common sense applies – no essays, blogs or child porn, and plenty of padding, simple interfaces that save time and judicious use of screen space.

And don't listen to naysayers who claim IPTV doesn't offer enough to differentiate itself from the existing platforms or it is over-hyped and won't happen. The world will always be flat to some, and the key question is not whether IPTV is some panacea arriving next month to uproot everything you've ever known, it's a question of what the dominant mechanism for TV will be in 20 years time. Sometimes you just need to come down from the tech-high and take a look at what people are buying in high-street stores and what your grandmother does. We still have to deal with black and white diehard viewers and people who end up turning off their TV when told they should "press red for more".

Alex will soon be offering a powerful one-day workshop course on IPTV and Video On-Demand (VoD) specifically for web professionals. It can help you get up to speed on the latest technologies, content deals, operators and applications across the world, and offer immense value in identifying both new opportunities and threats for your business and personal career. If you would like more information, call Alex on 07986 373177 or email iptvworkshop@digitaltx.tv. Readers who quote this publication as their source will receive a 10% discount on the course fees.

About Digital TX Limited
Formed in early 2004, privately owned and based in London (UK), Digital TX Limited is a provider of technology and consultancy for interactive digital television and broadband media. Some of the keywords you might associate with us are IPTV, Video On-Demand, Triple Play, Broadband Entertainment, Video Over IP, Interactive TV, Network Video Gaming and Telco TV.

Our mission is to be the world's leading wholesale provider of broadband entertainment. Our vision is of a world where personalised entertainment is available on-demand 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, at any time, anywhere in the world, on any device. Our technology can power anything your mind can imagine, and beyond.

Digital TX Limited has worked with many leading blue chip communications providers and can help catalyse your route to market for IPTV services by working with you to design your next-generation multimedia network, build your commercial deployment model and broker relationships with vendors, rightsholders, partners and customers. If we can be of any assistance please don't hesitate to contact Alexander Cameron on +44 (0) 7986 373177 or via email on alex.cameron@digitaltx.tv.

http://www.digitaltx.tv