Both AT&T - now with over a million subscribers, and Verizon have made huge inroad into the market with their IP based services. Thanks primarily to AT&T and Verizon, North America is expected to account for a large proportion of the world's new IPTV subscriptions during the next few years. They join the significant number of regional and local telecoms operators in North America who pioneered this new digital TV platform but the big question is whether any company bringing Pay TV to market this late - even those with the resources of AT&T - can gain significant market share on a national basis. The question remains how regional telcos can build a compelling TV offering at a realistic level on investment.

Meanwhile, the influence of IP is being felt most keenly outside the managed telco services space. In particular, the rise of Over the Top TV services, delivered over the open internet, provides a potentially massive disruption to the traditional TV service model. Whilst these services clearly popular with the public, the search for successful business models -  which enhance rather than undermine existing offers -  remains a challenge that the industry must embrace.

In North American IPTV service providers face a tougher test than their European counterparts, who have benefited from a natural watershed in the Pay TV marketplace thanks to the introduction of DVR (Digital Video Recorder), true VOD and Replay TV, and HDTV. In the US, VOD is an established cable offering and HDTV is available widely on cable and satellite. Cable operators have also pursued an increasingly aggressive triple-play strategy (they now have 24 million broadband Internet customers and 5 million telephone customers) and this makes it even harder to tempt customers from their legacy suppliers. Yet cable operators can also reap huge benefits from the implementation of IP, and potentially can enhance their services to combine IP efficiency & interactivity with existing bandwidth to deliver a highly compelling consumer solution.

Hybrid IPTV solutions - which combine managed IPTV with other delivery mechanisms such as DTH or Satellite -are the new boom area in the global IPTV market, with landmark deployments from early IPTV adopters such as Orange/France Telecom, Portugal Telecom & BT Vision. Whilst SES Americom's strategic withdrawal has marked an early failure in the US market, partnership models will increasingly be a feature of new TV service in North America, particularly in more circumspect times.These are some of the themes that will be addressed at the IPTV World Forum North America conference and exhibition, which will draw together leading IPTV service providers, content providers, analysts and key technology vendors for what we believe will become one of the key events in the North American IPTV calendar.