Telcos are so clever they seem to have slipped one past Doc Searls, here commenting on Robin Good’s IPTV post:

Well, here’s the first problem: Cable TV is “private delivery infrastructure”, and so is old-fashioned phone service. The mess Robin describes is not a conceptual stretch beyond Business As Usual — for telcos, cablecos or most of their customers. A few techies may know a line has been crossed, but that’s far from obvious to the rest of us.

Net losses, Doc Searls, 1 Feb 2007

Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? Most people won’t realize what’s the problem with what they’re getting, so they’ll buy the bundle.

How is such an IPTV bundle different from POTS or cable TV? It takes away any chance of choice of vendors. POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) uses standard protocols and wiring such that other carriers can interconnect. If Robin Good is right, the aDSL bundle he got uses proprietary protocols, so you can’t switch to any other carrier, even if one magically appears in your neighborhood. Cable TV is already closer to this kind of IPTV bundle, but from what Robin posted, it sounds like the IPTV bundle is farther along the lockin path and while promising faster Internet bandwidth actually allocates most of it to TV, just like cable does. In other words, if Robin is right, such a bundle promises to be different from cable TV in bandwidth allocation, and isn’t, really. That plus DRM, which is anti-customer choice by definition.

Doc Searls does detect a problem that Robin Good didn’t.

The second problem is that it’s dumb in the long run for either the cable or the phone companies to continue subordinating the Net to their traditional offerings. The smart thing for them to do is provide the widest and most open possible Net. and to sell many services on top of that, including telephony and television. Crippling the Net to favor TV is a failing strategy, regardless of whether or not the feds mandate Net Neutrality.

What the carriers need most is competition, and not just from each other.

I couldn’t agree more. However, telcos apparently don’t see it this way; they seem to think that allocating bandwidth for video is the important task, and everything should be subordinated to that. They don’t see IPTV as an Internet value added service; they see the Internet as a bag on the side of IPTV. This is why NTT may eat their lunch in the end.

-jsq