Has the hour finally come for IPTV in the Enterprise?

Unlike consumer IPTV, where service providers must capture market share from entrenched cable and satellite operators either via lower prices or preferably by offering something different, enterprise IPTV has had the opposite challenge of selling the solutions in the first place, but at least there's no competition to IP. By Philip Hunter

Video has had a chequered history in the enterprise, with video conferencing for years confined to heavy duty proprietary platforms, while the use of "business TV" to deliver corporate messages has never had employees hanging off their seats. But the potential applications have long been there. They include:

• Digital signage - for external applications such as advertising, customer information/communication, and brand building.
• Distance Training - exploiting video in training and online manual applications for employees, and also perhaps customers.
• Information/notice-boards, to transmit corporate messages more effectively to employees and partners.
• Surveillance and monitoring, using video for security and control.
• Telepresence, to extend videoconferencing across the enterprise; enhancing virtual meetings and facilitating teleworking.

Surveillance and digital signage are already in somewhat widespread use. The key point is that various developments are making video viable across all of the application sectors. These developments include falling prices of large plasma screens, which is particularly relevant for telepresence and digital signage, and, increased bandwidth and PC memory/CPU capacity, making it possible to integrate video into desk top Information/notice-board applications. Other factors include the standardisation of the video delivery platform (which has had the effect of reducing the cost and effort required for deploying video across the whole enterprise); greater ease of use (which removes the end user barrier for use of video in collaboration and conferencing), and new technologies for video management and analysis. On this last front there is a lot still to be desired, but progress is being made in video search and identification to increase the power of the medium, especially for surveillance and monitoring. One of the most exciting recent developments came from IBM, with the November 2006 launch of its Advanced Digital Video Surveillance Service, exploiting a new video content search technology called Smart Surveillance System (S3). This allows video sequences to be searched either in real time or from recordings for specific objects, such as cars, faces, or particular alphanumeric sequences as in vehicle license plates.

If it proves to work reliably and at sufficient speed, this has huge potential in security and law enforcement, where the effort involved in analyzing endless footage has been a severe handicap in video surveillance. Another way that some Enterprise video applications will be distinguished from Telco IPTV is that, rather than using a closed network, applications may exploit the open Internet. Past applications have tended either to be based on dedicated private circuits as in video conferencing, or even in digital signage to use sneakernet (physically removable media such as DVDs).

Use of the Internet means that many of the applications will involve transmission of files for subsequent streaming from a local drive or need advanced encoding to reduce bandwidth. Even when an internal network is used, bandwidth is often at a premium, so enterprise IPTV providers will be looking at speeds of less than 1mbps or even below 750 Kbps. Now that prospects are so much better, more companies are entering the enterprise IPTV fray. In the UK for example, STB provider Amino has collaborated with systems integrators to deliver IPTV for distance training and noticeboard, with clients including the TV company Discovery Networks Europe.

On a larger scale, Hughes Network Services is attacking the enterprise IPTV market from its base as a longstanding provider of business broadband services. The company is targeting the distance training sector in particular, with a solution supporting a combination of live broadcast and delivery for local on-demand playback, to cater for different applications and bandwidth needs. Cisco is spending heavily in developing and premarketing its forthcoming product range for telepresence, which at first sight sounds like suped-up videoconferencing, but is integrated within a coherent unified messaging platform. Then came Cisco's surprise $3.2 billion acquisition in March 2007 of WebEx, the world's top Web conferencing vendor. Cisco plans to integrate the WebEx platform with its unified messaging, and bring on telepresence as one major option for collaboration. The fact that video distribution is standardized around an IP network infrastructure is one factor suggesting that IPTV is poised for rapid growth within the enterprise.