"IPTV is a future technology because there are many areas for improvement and this needs to be driven to the market, but business is aware of the technology and it is using it."

He said as IPTV becomes more popular, broadband pricing will need to accommodate the increased strain on bandwidth as the technology is a heavy consumer of data. I

t is suggested that telecommunications providers will need to offer DSL rates of 20 to 40Mbps to accommodate for what Chaisatien sees as a total convergence of all voice and data applications to IP.

Gartner Asia Pacific vice president for research enterprise communications applications Geoff Johnson agreed with Chaisatien saying while IPTV has great enterprise and consumer potential, lagging consumer adoption and lack of product differentiation will push the technology back five to 10 years.

"IPTV has the potential to be transformational in terms of network architectures and service offerings, but consumer inertia, lack of product differentiation, market saturation and highly competitive multichannel video environments could [weaken] the market impact," Johnson said.