IPTV and prospects for regional TV stations

"French Tuesday" is an event held in various cities around the world on the first Tuesday of every month. The venue changes from event to event, and as the name suggests, is organized by French expatriots in a particular city. It gives me the chance to practice, to a limited extent, my rapidly rusting French language skills, though I've noticed that I now mix Spanish words into sentences on account of recent training in the langauge. I guess the non-English part of my brain is a large bucket into which foreign words are dumped...that, or the words I have used most frequently tend to come up first (the more likely answer).

The latest LA event was hosted by TV5, whose US Director, Patrice Courtaban, is featured in the photo, second from the right. TV5 is interesting if you are trying to learn French, as they broadcast most shows with French subtitles. This serves as a tremendous way to untangle French sentences which have a tendency to glob together into one long French-sounding word.

The event, however, got me thinking about the prospects of regional, and even local, TV stations in the Internet age. TV5 is a large and well funded TV station (partly funded by the French government) and can afford a global reach using current distribution options for television signals. Most regional TV stations, however, such as the stations I used to watch in Switzerland, can't afford such reach, and thus won't reach beyond Swiss borders.

Part of the cost is due to bandwidth scarcity. Traditional cable broadcasting requires multiple signals to be broadcast simultaneously on the same wire. This means that, irrespective of whether you watch the Home Shopping Network, it is taking up valuable bandwidth on the broadcasting network. Given these bandwidth limits, broadcasters must be careful about the channels they add to their lineup. This leaves little room for anything but large and well funded regionally-oriented TV stations, and those are only viable if there is a large enough market in an area to justify the expense.

IPTV, however, improves on this model by only delivering over the wire the content you are currently watching. IPTV, as the name suggests, delivers content using standard TCP/IP network technology (and though Microsoft makes an IPTV solution, it is not the only one). Besides the fact that some of the same technology used to build out a traditional IP network network can be used in the construction of IPTV broadcasting networks (creating new opportunities for economics of scale, management consistency for networks that already offer high-speed internet service, etc.), it means, theoretically, that IPTV networks have a nearly infinite capacity to support new channels.

This should be good news to regional television stations. By removing the bandwidth constraints on cable television networks, it lowers the cost for broadcasters to add a new channel to the lineup. With lower costs, a station does not need as many customers in a new market to justify entry. This creates the potential for small stations to treat the entire globe as a potential market.

In other words, the convergence between television and IP-networks creates the potential to greatly increase revenue streams for small television stations. This is good news for regional stations, which means TV5 may be only the tip of the iceberg from the standpoint of a growing global market for entertainment service. It also should be good news to governments interested in cultivating a local media production industry. Technology might soon reach a point where such content becomes economically viable in its own right, driven by a growing number of regional stations funded by access to a global network for television service.

IPTV isn't there quite yet, but it is clearly where the technology is heading.