Technologies for managing and supporting content distribution and billing in a converged world are largely here today, in place, and familiar to industry participants. The challenges and limitations of recent years, either in the TV-readiness of telecoms and their networks, or in the availability of chipsets that can handle video standards, are gone. Players are now turning their attention to the business of turning TV services into something compelling for consumers and competitive against other service providers.

This means their requirements have begun to gravitate toward higher order needs such as solutions for monitoring and measuring the quality of broadcast signals over an IP network or managing content distribution in an increasingly complex multimedia environment. Billing approaches are also becoming more important, not only because broadcast-based tripleplay services create more complex services bundles that must be processed, but also because what is becoming evident to players in the space (and their technology purveyors) is that in order to be truly different in a media-saturated world, ondemand services have to be effectively introduced (there is some variance in opinion on the value of on-demand services in the industry, however, as we?ll see below). There are still some significant sticking points. By all accounts IPTV service development should be further along than it is today. But the majority of the remaining challenges are in adjusting the business models of industry participants. All that remains is for the industry to get on with it and actually drag IPTV off of the ?shelf of good ideas? into a defining revenue spinner for converged service carriers.