AfterDawn: Tech news

Consumer awareness of IPTV high in United States

Written by James Delahunty @ 15 Feb 2006 12:26 User comments (6)

A research firm has revealed that despite only having limited availability, about 56 of adults in the United States said they knew about IPTV, and a substantial number of those people said they would consider having it on their home TVs and computers. The survey was conducted by Harris Interactive. The firm said that the findings pose somewhat of a threat to existing cable and satellite TV services. 17% of the interested people said they would cancel their existing services.
Two thirds of those who were interested said they would keep their current services running and trial IPTV. Only 7% said they would add IPTV to their existing services. It seems that so many people are aware of IPTV as it would be less expensive (apparently) than cable or satellite services. It would also have the technical ability to delivery programming on demand instead of on schedule.

A quarter of the people said they would want IPTV for their televisions and one in five said they would consider adopting it to watch on computers. Less than 4% would be interested in viewing IPTV content on a mobile phone however. Overall, 12% claimed they'd be ready to sign up for IPTV immediately for the PC now, and 18% said they would be if it was available for PC and could be sent to the TV using a set-top box.



Source:
Techweb

Previous Next  

6 user comments

115.2.2006 07:22

I'm assuming that IPTV stands for Internet Protocol Television. Is that right? I guess I'm not one of the 56%! As a Tivo Series 2 owner, I've already seen a glimpse of this. With my Tivo connected to the internet through my broadband connection, I can download small clips of content offered through the Tivo service. Right now it's pretty limited. Things like 3 minute commercials about a new car, or the theatrical trailer for a new movie. But it definitely shows promise of things to come!

215.2.2006 08:02

Well I have a TV wonder Pro and Elite and I'm quite happy with them for watching TV on my computer so I probably wouldn't get it.

315.2.2006 10:42

slingbox lets you control your home calbe over an internet connection anywhere in the world

415.2.2006 13:24

First time I've heard of this, but it sounds pretty promising. I'll see if this is an option next time I get a new TV.

516.2.2006 09:34

Shoutcast TV anyone? Nevermind... This is (just) one of the big reasons why the media companys are pushing to "throttle" ('eliminate' is probably a better word) P2P traffic. The $hitload of bandwidth needed to provide on-demand video content can't be gettin' hogged up by us P2P users!

620.2.2006 10:45

I read an article in Business Week recently that said that Verizon has partioned off about 80% of its broadband bandwidth for video content. So, if you use Verizon broadband as your ISP, and you want to view streaming video, it will work fine as long as the content comes from Verizon. But if you try to stream video from another source, it's got to compete for the remaining 20% of bandwidth that Verizon is squeezing everyone else into.

Comments have been disabled for this article.

News archive