The meagerly attended TelcoTV in Atlanta last week had a stunning demonstration that Faultline missed, because we were busy running a mobile TV session ourselves. The demonstration was by AT&T but reports reaching us from blog sites and from papers like Cable Next, highlighted what we’ve said about IPTV ahead of cable for years ‘ that it is not just the pure TV service, but all the other IP based applications that can come into play after, which make IPTV such a neat offering when done well.
AT&T Labs demonstrated 13 different concept services at the show pointing out that this was only the tip of the iceberg and there were many other applications that were not ready to be shown to the public, but which would be shown soon.
AT&T said that there would be far more HDTV services because of rapid improvements in H.264 encoding and also touted multi-room DVRs to arrive, shortly before showing off other IP based applications.
These included caller ID on the TV set, with the ability to push it off into voice mail, TV display of voicemail, and forwarding voice mails to cell phones based on where they are rather than just re-routing all the time. There was also an SMS to TV screen application, which can also be offered with Instant Messaging.
AT&T demonstrated more cellphone based services including emailing photos taken on the phone directly to a set-top DVR so they were viewable and searchable from the EPG, and a family finder application using GPS on the handset, reported via the TV screen. Of course you have to get your family to take a GPS cellphone and then turn the facility on first.
The demonstration also included video from a remote camera to the TV set, a flight tracking application by flight number (for when you are watching TV and have to know when to leave to pick someone up at the airport), and weathermaps, web radio access, a movie trailer database and Flickr photo albums via the TV. And of course programming the DVR via an iPhone.
None of this stuff is released and it is not down to the laboratories to decide when or whether they should be launched, only to point out that once you work in a purely IP world, this stuff is fairly easy to do.