With organisations increasingly keen to explore the full breadth and scope of their newly converged, IP-based networks, more and more may start boxing clever with IPTV, says Tracey Caldwell.

It was said by Newton that for every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction. And this, his Third Law, recently seems to have become as intractable in business as it is in physics. Not least for anyone trying to introduce consumer technology into the enterprise.

Facebook faces bans, wikis have been branded wicked, and as for Internet TV... the very thought of hearing the theme tune of some daytime TV soap echoing tinnily across their peaceful open plan premises has bosses turning in their ivory towers.

Talk about an equal and opposite reaction.

Many of the more enlightened among them are beginning to reach a rather different conclusion however; that properly controlled and managed television access could benefit both the business and employee morale.

IPTV, sometimes distinguished from Internet TV, sometimes not, and also termed WebTV by some for good measure, is a technology already pretty familiar to the average consumer. And with instant access to content like news, entertainment, information, and advertising, as well as utilities like hospitality industry booking systems, corporate broadcasts, on the fly financial updates, and market information, it makes a great deal of sense.

It should be noted that there are some important distinctions between the consumer and B2B IPTV. (Telco IPTV is usually delivered to home consumers over a closed network designed for bandwidth-efficient delivery of huge amounts of multicast TV, while Internet TV as used by businesses is more commonly delivered over the Internet itself). But in reality the technology is actually quite similar, and businesses may now be set to benefit from vendor over-supply in the consumer sector.

Shane Walker is IPTV analyst at IMS Research. He says: "Consumer use of telco-provided IPTV services continues to hold the attention of most suppliers, due to the fact that IPTV is a relatively new platform with a great deal of growth potential.

"However, the complexity of the IPTV ecosystem combined with the quantity of vendors competing for telco dollars has led some infrastructure and middleware providers (in the space) to look for new opportunities. This includes working with business to provide IPTV via their local area networks (LANs)." 

While business use has been slow to ramp and initial IPTV installations have been centred mainly on the replacement of existing TV networks in businesses such as hotels, many vendors - notably Cisco for instance - have now started down the business route. Others however (Microsoft for one) remain committed to consumer IPTV. (And this is despite the fact that business users can receive IPTV on to PCs with significant processing power, in comparison with more limited consumer set-top boxes.)

Issues with quality and bandwidth - some real, some merely perceived - have discouraged many companies from expending much energy considering IPTV's commercial potential until recently. And even then few have woken up fully to the possibilities of areas such as multi-play offerings. But this is changing according to Walker, who cites of high profile LAN-based deployments including NASA and NBC Universal. 

IPTV specialist Amino moved into the market when Ericsson approached it to design IPTV applications (it designed a set-top box for the telco giant), and analyst figures now put it on the leaderboard of set-top suppliers. Neil Gazeley, marketing manager for Internet TV with the company, nevertheless believes that the business market is broadening out.

Amino started out selling to the hotel and hospitality trade; upgrading existing guest entertainment at low cost and introducing interactive services, but now a broader range of businesses is recognising the benefits, he says. There's a lot of interest from digital signage companies, for instance; looking to deliver specific content to specific areas - in supermarkets for example.

"One device can drive several screens and control which advert is delivered to which screen. The IPTV system can interact with other systems and databases - there's no point advertising something that's gone out of stock - so it can interrogate the database and adjust accordingly."

Gazeley says that IPTV is also seeing increasing use in corporate communications - for internal promotions and motivation; as a method of sharing news; and in interactive training "where we're doing a lot of work in delivering training solutions to the corporate and education sectors."

Exterity provides one example of IPTV's motivational potential. Combining TV, live video and video on demand with Internet services, Exterity installations entail cameras installed as nodes on the network to supply video which can be used for security, staff presentations, and even video conferencing.

CEO Colin Farquhar cites two particular call-centre projects his company is working on in Scotland, where the client companies had been experiencing absenteeism around major football matches. They couldn't rely on staff being where they needed to be during games, and they couldn't bring the staff to the television; so they decided to bring the television to the staff.

"We are getting more and more questions about integrating TV service with CCTV services", says Farquhar. "And there's a big push in educating organisations on the potential. We work with Cisco on its Digital Media system which can be used for educating sales forces on issues quickly; for compliance for example."

According to Gazeley, cost and technology need no longer be the barriers to adoption they perhaps once were; imagination is what is needed: "At the low end a basic set-top box can play up to four screens with a £400 video server (so) technology is no longer the barrier. It's a case of identifying which services add value. That's in interactivity and it's slowly starting to take place."

The words 'video' and 'network' in the same sentence will, however, continue to raise a pair of large red flags with many businesses - bandwidth and quality. (Fair enough. Who wants to clog up their network for a TV feed that breaks up like a bad mobile connection?) But they needn't worry according to Farquhar.

"People don't understand the potential of their networks. They worry about capacity but (often) haven't quantified the scale of the capacity available to them. A City company raised this concern with us, but as a TV channel might take 4Mb per second, they only needed 4% of their link to support the TV service."

Neither has IPTV's uptake been helped by business's en masse migration to wireless. Wi-Fi promises many benefits, but high-quality reliable TV and video delivery is rarely among them. However there are signs that emerging technologies based on the new 802.11n wireless networking standard are changing that.

Mid-sized companies of around 5,000 employees generally aren't in the market for
top-end Wi-Fi solutions, and often find that cheaper gear doesn't work well or won't
scale. "The Unfortunate Five Thousand" as these companies have been dubbed by some suppliers, have commonly not had wireless networks robust enough to host IPTV. 
"For most Wi-Fi systems, interference is a big issue", says David Callisch, communications director at wireless supplier Ruckus. "Most must transmit and receive in all directions at all times. When interference is introduced, these systems lower their data rate as packet loss increases." 

As an example of the new technologies now emerging to counteract such issues, Ruckus' claims that its latest offering avoids interference by utilising antenna technologies and 802.11n to route the wireless signal more intelligently - whilst requiring around a fifth of the number of wired access points as a traditional wireless system.

In common with the delivery of so many other media applications else these days, IPTV's availability over wireless will be a key piece in building out its overall jigsaw. Right now though, it's tempting for the average business to view said jigsaw as still being in the box in a thousand pieces. And without even a picture on the lid to act as a guide.

Clarity does look to be on its way however. Several vendor partnerships are rumoured to be in the offing that could well crystalise all this "out of the box" thinking. 

To IPTV or not to IPTV?

The Royal Shakespeare Company has installed IPTV as part of the transformation of its theatres. Staff had been crammed into cupboards and corridors so the RSC moved some of them out to adjacent offices. They need to be able to see and hear what is happening in the auditorium, so IPTV technology streams live images of rehearsals and productions to big LCD screens in the new offices.

This has also had the important effect of allowing all staff to continue to feel part of the exciting and creative culture of the Company, according to Simon Harper, RSC deputy project director.
Harper describes this as the first step in the company's use of IPTV. When the two theatres presently closed are reopened, video images will be fed direct to desktops as well as the big screens so that people can choose which production to track.

He says: "We need to start developing how we capture and produce content. Now the system is a window on to stage, but when the other theatres reopen we will develop that and pump marketing information around. We want to encourage people to buy all tickets for a season so will be able to present a montage of information. This gives us a high quality method of recording shows so that we can archive them and use them for publicity."

The system also provides controlled access to TV channels, mainly for news feeds or relevant content. There are also plans to consider the creation of an IPTV-based staff 'newsletter' instead of the current email, and to extend system's use to staff trainin