Facebook and Twitter are fighting for key roles in the worldwide television market, particularly TV advertising and pay-TV, as Internet-connected television makes TV into a social medium, says a report by research company Futurescape.

Futurescape publishes strategy reports on the business of social television. It is launching its latest title, Social TV: How Facebook, Twitter and connected television transform global TV advertising, pay-TV, EPGs and broadcasting.

This is the first critical appraisal of how the battle between the two major social networks over social TV is shaping twenty-first century television and challenging the TV industry.

IPTV network operators face a complex array of issues and challenges as they scale their networks to deliver more robust services to a wider group of customers, and those challenges aren't limited solely to subscriber headcount, according to the latest report from Heavy Reading Insider, a paid research service of TechWeb's Heavy Reading.

IPTV Scaling Presents a Multidimensional Challenge examines how IPTV systems are changing in response to growing demands from customers and service providers. It examines how systems deal with increasing reach and numbers of subscribers, and with growth in the amount of content and data volumes for managed and unmanaged delivery. It assesses how systems are evolving to deliver video content to multiple devices, and how IPTV platforms are supporting the development of innovative applications. Eleven leading IPTV system vendors are profiled and analyzed, with a focus on those with end-to-end or near end-to-end capabilities.

Online video distribution to the PC is predominantly an open platform: if you can launch a web site, you can distribute your content. But the distribution picture to the TV is quite different. Here, closed platforms provide a fixed set of content from which users can pick. For an Internet content provider to deliver video to the TV, a deal is required with the platform provider first. In 2008, Sir Howard Stringer, Sony's CEO, said "Sony's unique position in electronics and entertainment will enable us to provide specialized offering for Sony customers directly to their television outside conventional distributors..." Can companies such as Sony, Apple and Microsoft control the delivery of Internet video to the television? Or can open solutions such as Google TV win out?