Research and Markets has announced the addition of Challenges for Korean IPTV Industry to their offering.

This report analyzes and prospects the IPTV market in Korea. More specifically, the report covers the reasons for the IPTV service delay and estimates a possible market size after the service launch. In addition, it explores the status and the progress of carriers such as SKT, Hanaro Telecom and Powercomm in preparing IPTV service. Lastly, it prospects the possible effects that IPTV service brings to telecommunications and broadcasting industries. The development status of IPTV market in other countries is provided in the appendix.

TRAI released the proposed amendments in the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and the existing Telecom Licenses for facilitation of growth of IPTV services in the country.

Edgeware, a start-up company developing scalable and cost efficient high performance servers for on-demand television services, today announced that Amadeus Capital Partners has joined Creandum as co-investor by committing 17Msek in addition to 11Msek committed by Creandum.

ROO and Times Online have launched an innovative new online TV and video service.

Powered by ROO, Times Online TV offers readers dozens of news, business, entertainment and other features from respected providers such as Reuters.

Times Online users can now access regular news bulletins, packages of fashion and entertainment video and oddball stories from around the world. Over time, exclusive content from Times Online and its partners will be offered on the service.

Alcatel announced that it has been selected by Telefonica de Espana to provide access, aggregation and optical networking solutions, enabling Telefonica to offer high bandwidth interactive services to its consumer and corporate customers.

The integrated and flexible architecture will provide higher bandwidth capacity per subscriber with unique differentiated quality of services, enabling the simultaneous delivery of personalized multimedia services such as IPTV, video on demand and HDTV to residential customers and advanced virtual private network services for its corporate customers.

The first 24-hour live interactive Internet television reality program will debut on June 14, announced executive producer Darin Myman of BigString Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of BigString Corporation.

The program, OurPrisoner, features a 35-year-old-single-man, Kieran Vogel, who has volunteered to allow the Internet audience to control every aspect of his life for six months live, on camera, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of The Thin Red Line: Access for All or Just for the Rich? to their offering.

This is an iDRD (Insight-based Data-Rich Deliverable) that is part of the Business IP market & Subscription. This insight discusses and analyzes AT&T's announcement to bring satellite broadband to rural areas that are hard to reach and IPTV to the low-income communities and expand the scope of their WiMAX offerings. Business IP includes services used to carry and/or connect to the Internet. This category include Full and Fractional T1 and T3 connections, broadband services, dial-up Internet access, OC-X services and both TDM and VoIP-based Integrated Access. Wireline Data services include expenditures on for-fee data transport services over the public switched telephone network or an in-ground private data network (IP, ATM, frame relay etc.). These services include, but are not limited to, high speed Internet access (DSL, cable, and ISDN), T1+ transport services (local access charges not included), frame relay, ATM, Ethernet MAN services, and hosted services provisioned directly to the customer by a telecom service provider (co-location, Web hosting, applications hosting, infrastructure hosting, managed network services). The Expert Guide for this DRD is Kneko Burney. Forecasts are from 2005 through 2010 and include annual growth rate, as well as percentage of total market.

Pennsylvania consumers want choice, competition and an alternative to their cable company, according to the results of a recent survey by Public Opinion Strategies, a national political and public affairs research firm.

The Verizon-sponsored telephone poll of 500 registered voters in Pennsylvania showed that the overwhelming majority of those interviewed clearly supported video choice. The response was clear, nonpartisan and consistent across rural, urban and suburban communities.

The days of standalone communications services are numbered. Consumer demand for the convenience of bundled communications services is growing. That's why U.S. communications providers are taking huge initiatives to add to their service offerings by creating bundled packages of voice, video, broadband, and mobile wireless services. IDC predicts that the U.S. market for bundled services will grow from fewer than 45 million customer relationships today to more than 84 million in 2010.

As a precursor towards this press release, we would like to note that IPTV in this article most often refers to Internet TV. Our definition of IPTV usually refers to a service operated by a cable or telecom system. We do agree that IPTV, in its raw form, could take on multiple meanings but the majority of this article speaks, based on our definition, of services that would be deemed Internet TV and video.

To date, mainstream media attention on Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has focused for the most part on such entertainment programming as the amateur videos of YouTube.com and popular television shows such as "Lost" that now are made available for download to iPods. But IPTV is "a potentially multi-billion dollar industry in the very near term" due, in part, to expected strong demand for more customized programming that will focus on meeting the needs of professional groups and organizations of allied individuals (such as senior citizens, hobbyists and trade association members), according to a major new report from the New Millennium Research Council (NMRC).

Research and Markets has announced the addition of 2006 Latin America Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband - Overview to their offering.

Broadband grew at an annual rate of around 75% in 2005, making Latin America one of the world's fastest growing regions in terms of broadband uptake. However, it still accounts for only 3.9% of the world's broadband pie.

Latin America may see the first deployments of IPTV in 2006, with Brazil, Chile, and Argentina at the forefront. Broadband penetration in the region, however, is still low, and broadband TV is unlikely to become a reality in Latin America until 2007.

SeaChange International customer OnDemand TV, Inc. is launching the world's first IPTV on-demand service to offer high-definition programming encoded in the H.264 video compression standard. Beginning next month, FTTH-connected subscribers around Tokyo and Osaka will have access to on-demand libraries of high-definition movies, sports and other programming.

CNET has a write-up describing AT&T's U-Verse IPTV service and the challenges they now face in terms of acquiring customers, proving service quality, and being able to support new features going forward. The article should have been titled, "IPTV Prepares for Prime Time in the U.S." IPTV has actually been slow to take shape in the U.S. compared with Europe, Asia, and even Canada, where some companies have been offering IPTV for several years.

Despite semantics though, it will be interesting to see how the offerings of AT&T and Verizon stack up in the near and long term with both of them taking dramatically different approaches in their network rollouts. Is AT&T clever in their network approach or will they end up with a bottleneck long-term?

TiVo Inc. announced the launch of TiVoCast, a new service which will deliver broadband video directly to the television sets of TiVo subscribers. The TiVoCast service turns Web video into television by bringing top broadband content now only available on the PC to the TV set.

The Montgomery County township of Perkiomen brought its residents a major step closer to choice for their cable television services, thanks to the township supervisors' vote last night (June 6) authorizing Verizon to offer its fiber-optic-powered FiOS TV.