HDTV + IPTV challenges

With all the hoopla over "triple play" and IPTV, only a precious few customers actually can get high definition television service from their telco right now, why the hold up? XChange Magazine takes a look into it with two different articles on the subject.

With so many customers already having DVR and HDTV access via their cable providers,
SBC and others know they need to bring that or else there is no point in trying to compete. The fact is, the equipment is not quite ready yet.
Motorola does not anticipate having their MPEG-4 capable set-top boxes until the second quarter of next year, and while SureWest is using Amino's MPEG-2 solution, they note even that took considerable work to get picture quality where they wanted it.

On the other end, even though providers know MPEG-4 is the way to give customers all the channels they want without using all of their bandwidth, the combination of hardware and software to provide encoding and head-end services is still lagging.
As I just said, Motorola will have STB's in Q2 of 2006, but don't expect to have encoding equipment out for for almost a year.

Will IPTV providers overcome these hurdles and bring new and more varied TV capabilities to the table at a competitive price point
(anytime soon)? That remains to be seen.