The Most Important IPTV Applications - Poll Results

And the results of our latest poll are in. Starting a few weeks ago, we asked you "what’s the most important IPTV application for subscribers?" Three distinct groups of responses emerged from the results. Coming in a comfortable first place as your most important application is “internet on TV”. Clearly, having access to internet on TV is important. I’m wondering why this scored so highly? Do people want to:

look up information associated with the program they’re watching?
multi-task – watch one sports event while tracking results of other events?
have access to favourite web applications and portals?
watch video content like YouTube over the internet ?

Instead of guessing, I'm going to use this as a topic for the next poll. We can drill down to see why this is so important!

The areas you voted as the next most important applications include Basic TV, Personalized Advertising, Red Button TV and DVR. The message here seems to be “give me my basic TV and allow for some personalization (personalized advertising at 11%) and more interactivity while I watch TV" (DVR at 11% and Red Button TV at 10%).

The third set of applications you want to see is EPG (4%), VOD (6%), StartOver TV (3%) and convergence applications (4%). This grab bag of applications would appear to tell us a few things. That EPG, VOD and StartOver TV are now tablestakes applications. They remain important but are less differentiating than they were 12 months ago. My guess is that convergence applications will become more important over time - they are an exciting development but haven’t quite achieved critical importance for the industry.

Of course, these are all my opinions & I’d love to get your impressions too. Please post your comments. And for those who love to see the actual results, here they are! Watch for the new poll in a few days.

Poll Results