IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

Om Malik has provided some possible insight as to how Satellite content providers may evolve into something completely different, I quote:
" The Akimbo investment by AT&T also hints at a hybrid-TV-IP future …
Forget that, for a minute. These hybrid boxes are intriguing beasts, and can be quite helpful for telecom operators who are still struggling to roll out their IPTV networks, and losing ground to cable."

In June 2006, my colleague Dave Siegel ran the numbers in understanding the scalability of bandwidth usage against comments from Bell South’s CTO Brian Smith, followed in July by a quote from an interview Ronald Gruia conducted with Brian Smith:
"We have had our eyes open on IPTV, and none of the problems you mentioned were a surprise to us. Our primary concern was scalability, and we are working with them."

From a capacity perspective:
- a terrestrial content/broadband provider deploying an ITU-T G.983 fiber to the home system (also know as APON or BPON or marketed by Verizon as FiOS) has capacity of 622Mbit/s downstream. Assuming High Definition TV (HDTV) compressed to MPEG-4, requires 13Mbit/s per channel (at 720p resolution) or 47 HDTV channels per connected household.
- While a satellite content/broadband provider utilizing both C-band and Ku-band transponders will have capacity for over 1,000 local HDTV channels and 150 national HDTV channels per system..

Looks like a satellite operator has more downstream capacity to support HDTV but have a weakness in addressing scalable capacity for OnDemand, while terrestrial operators have less downstream capacity but a strength in being able to push content closer to households for a scable OnDemand offer.

If you add the broadband internet access problem to this equation, I think you'll find that Om may be onto something!!