According to InfoCom’s most recent release of its Quarterly Television Monitoring Service, IPTV has been making its way through the pay-TV market with an increasing popularity in countries that generally have a large broadband subscriber base.

While some operators achieved six to seven-figure IPTV subscriber numbers, others were not as successful. In the UK, for instance, despite having significant number of broadband users, take-up of IPTV has been sluggish due to satellite and Freeview’s strong market hold that places the IPTV players at a disadvantage. Tiscali, in particular, has plateaued between 36,000 to 45,000 IPTV subscriptions from 2005 until 1H08. In Germany, Hansenet has been struggling to add subscribers since its IPTV launch in 2006. Telecom Italia and Spain’s Jazztel were also among these providers, which, despite their early IPTV commercialisation, have lagged behind in the IPTV race.

Envivio has been awarded the prestigious 2008 TelcoTV Vision Award for its 4Caster C4 Three Screens multi-channel, multi-profile encoder for IPTV, Internet TV and Mobile TV applications. Selection was spearheaded by a panel of industry experts who sought to identify the year's most innovative product among all encoding technologies for mobile or terrestrial applications. The award was received at a ceremony held during this week's TelcoTV 2008 conference in Anaheim, California.

SaskTel International and Mariner partner to address the growth and maturation of the global IPTV marketplace. According to recent research by Infonetics, global IPTV subscribers are forecasted to continue to grow to 72 million by 2011, despite the concerns over the current economic situation. Infonetics expects service providers to continue heavy investment in IPTV content and transport equipment as investment shifts from Ethernet routers and switches to content infrastructure, such as video on demand servers.

Alcatel-Lucent announces a significant evolution of its Triple Play Services Delivery Architecture (TPSDA), providing a foundation for service providers to deliver superior video quality, with greater personalisation and interactivity. The enhancements to TPSDA offer a more cost-effective and flexible platform for high bandwidth services such as HDTV, an improved IPTV user experience - with immediate channel changing and more reliable TV service - and helps to facilitate the insertion into TV programs of advertisements that are targeted to specific communities or localities, in turn enabling the development of new TV advertising business models.

As previously announced, the Swedish Customs imposed customs duties on Tilgin in March 2007 and July 2008 and initiated an audit regarding additional imports. As expected, Tilgin has now received imposed customs duties of approx SEK 10 million on the additional imports. Tilgin appealed the first two decisions to the County Administrative Court and will appeal this claim as well. If Tilgin were ultimately to incur any customs duties, the company intends to claim compensation from the relevant customer.

TVoverNet is delighted to support the launch of the Telco 2.0 Initiative’s new survey on Internet Video Distribution, part of a major investigation into new business models run in partnership with multiple international industry bodies.

Do take part here. It takes 15-20 minutes to complete and you’ll get a free copy of the summary results if you invest the time to complete it properly. (The system allows you to come back to complete it if you need to take a break). Survey closes 1st October 2008. survey

Widespread deployment of IPTV services is currently hampered by a lack of interoperability among products. The Open IPTV Forum, the pan-industry initiative that was established to produce an end-to-end solution, is now fulfilling that promise. The Forum is pleased to announce that a number of detailed system and protocol specifications for Release 1 have been finalized at its meeting in Berlin, Sep 8 - 11.

Those specifications will allow the industry to deploy IPTV networks and devices that inter-operate, while offering an evolution path for the future. Such networks and devices will allow the industry to deliver IPTV services that are easy to use as well as attractive to the end user.

UTStarcom has been recognized as the leading broadband infrastructure company in India by Voice&Data for the second year in a row. The V&D100 Top Broadband Infrastructure Company award, which was presented to UTStarcom during the V&D100 Awards by S. C. Khanna, Secretary General, Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India, recognizes UTStarcom's sustained leadership in broadband infrastructure and its direct impact on India's telecom market growth. The Voice&Data 100 is an exhaustive annual survey conducted by Voice&Data Magazine, the leading magazine in the Indian telecom services and equipment industries. The ranking of companies in several segments, including broadband, is derived from Voice&Data's vendor revenue estimates based on surveys and market analysis.

IPTV subscriber numbers are growing steadily, but widespread uptake of services is yet to reach its full promise. As telcos, service providers and content and technology vendors prepare to gather in Amsterdam for one of the industry’s larger events, BitBand refutes some of the most prevalent myths that deter potential players from entering this booming market.

Find out the top ten myths after the jump.

Oki has developed “Audience Rating Information System” for IPTV, which will be offered to the Japanese market. The system collects viewership data to enable broadcasting companies to improve their services.

IPTV service is expected to grow as telecom carriers in Japan will increase their IPTV service provisioning with the start of next-generation network services, and the ITU working on setting international standards. Current ground-based broadcasting systems have functions to collect viewership data such as user preference and viewer history, as it is important for broadcasting companies to collect such information. However, with current IPTV services, there are no equivalent user information collection functions.

Netvue showcased live HD TV over IPTV at its recent IPTV Technology event held in central London, UK.

The live HD channel from satellite was captured by Exterity’s DVB-S TV gateway and distributed as IPTV on a local area network, before being received and decoded by Exterity HD receivers on the network. Netvue also showed full HD H.264 video IPTV encoding, from Exterity’s first production HD IPTV encoder.

Netvue also showed live SD IPTV distribution, wireless IPTV units and Digital Signage at the one day event. The company’s IPTV systems offer busineses all the benefits of live broadcast TV on their IT computer network, including TV on computer desktops, Video on Demand and Digital Signage.

KyLinTV announces the total money raised for its relief campaign to help China earthquake victims. In response to the disaster that hit Wenchuan County, KyLinTV established the KyLinTV China Earthquake Relief Fund on May 16th.

The Relief Fund raised an incredible total of $385,196 for earthquake victims, where $192,598 came from individual donors and $192,598 was contributed by the KyLinTV matching fund.

More than 3,800 generous individuals, most of whom were KyLinTV subscribers, contributed to this worthy cause with donations ranging from $5 to $5,000. The campaign ran the week of 5/16/2008 to 5/24/2008 and every single donation was matched dollar for dollar by KyLinTV.

RealPage has selected BitBand as its affiliate vendor for implementing on-demand IPTV services. This partnership reinforces the growing emphasis by the multifamily industry of bringing interactive TV entertainment to its residents.

RealPage provides products and services to more than 20,000 apartment communities across the United States. RealPage’s entertainment and communications service, StarFire, offers residents IPTV, broadband, telephony. BitBand’s solutions include BitBand's Maestro Content Distribution and Management suite, BitBand’s Vision VOD appliance servers, as well as BitBand’s CMS, content management system, for smart and efficient content ingestion and delivery across the network.

YouTube to Offer Live Video Feeds in 2008?
YouTube to begin live streaming video? Thats what YouTube co-founder, Steve Chen hinted during a YouTube party in NYC. Steve Chen claims, "2008. We’ll do it this year. Live video is just something that we’ve always wanted to do, we’ve never had the resources to do it correctly, but now with Google, we hope to actually launch something this year."

MySpace is Playing "Keeping up with the Joneses"
After Dailymotion began offering it's HD video to the web last week. Myspace is now launching their own HD video player for the social networking community. The HD trailer for Marvel Comic's new movie Iron Man can be found at Myspace's Trailer Park.

Belgacom TV Reaches Over 300,000 Subscribers
Belgian IPTV service Belgacom TV reached over 300,000 customers at the end of 2007. Belgacom TV added 165,654 new homes at a monthly service price of €16.10 in 2007. Belgacom's growth helped make it the second largest digital TV player in the country just behind Telenet's 400,000 customers. With the indtroduction of the 'comfort view' offer that provides pause live TV and one-touch recording on the PVR Belgacom hopes to continue its expansion.

AT&T has to replace the batteries in the cabinets for U-Verse IPTV because of four fires have broken out in different locations. AT&T doesn't feel comfortable with the batteries that provide backup power to over 17,00 of its equipment cabinets in neighborhoods across the United States. There is no immediate guess as to how quickly AT&T can replace all the batteries and has declined to answer any questions on the costs of the effort.

Saveaccess.org provides some images of the fire started by the exploding batteries in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.