DTT covers 75% of the Italian populations and more than 20 channels are available. Most channels are Free To Air but the Mediaset Group has also a PayPerView service ("Mediaset Premium") for soccer matches, new movies and first vision TV series.
DTT Switch off will be introduced region by region in order to arrive at the 2012 goal: currently the Sardinia region is completely digital, and many more are coming in 2009, covering in DTT only about 14 millions people out of 58 millions

DTT switch off is managed by the government with the help of DGTVi, a consortium of the broadcasters for technical rules. Last January RAI and Mediaset announced a new satellite services, named "Tivu' Sat", similar to the Freeview model in UK (some info in Italian at Sat-Zone )

Meanwhile, all major telco operators in Italy launched IPTV services in the last years: Telecom Italia (the incumbent), Fatsweb (the first operator with an iptv service in his portfolio) and WIND. While Wind is in his very early stages, Telecom and Fastweb have both reached about 300K customers.

The services offered are both linear channel (via multicast), and video on demand services. Value added services offered are typical IPTV ones, such as content categorization or channel list customization, HD for both live transmissions and vod, content recommendation and some advanced search feature or like PVR functionality.

Nevertheless IPTV is going to become one of the key services telcos will bet on, in Italy. The switch off from analogue TV broadcasting to DTT one, will take place for the next 2 years and opens a lot of opportunities. People will find themselves in the condition to choose to buy a new TV set with an integrated tuner or a DTT stb. But there is a third way. IPTV service could become one of the alternatives the customer will choose among: all IPTV services in fact are ready with Hybrid STB (i.e. both DTT and IP).

Combining in one STB its offer with the other four major Italian TV broadcaster ones, both air and satellite, a Telco is able to offer a complete solution to customers coming from the analogue world.

The "all in one box" is the way followed, with DTT, IPTV, internet, DLNA for home media sharing. The business requirements are pushing hard the evolution of the software platforms that are used to deliver IPTV services In fact, to achieve this goal the SW "platform" managing the IPTV services should be open and flexible, able to offers Digital Asset Management - DAM - services and to integrate with external Operation and Business Support System (OSS/BSS).

To cover all the "broadcasting" offers already present in the market, agreements have been be made with SKY ( the most important satellite operator in Italy) and with the other three major broadcaster: RAI (the national one), Mediaset and LA7. Each agreement has its own peculiarity and telco platforms should be flexible enough to interface itself with OSS/BSS/CMS of the external company.

This is achieved by putting in place a complex architecture with several components.
Among them, a contribution network, which carries all the signals coming from broadcasters to the DAM, where all the asset management is performed. For example, a provider (both broadcasters and content providers) can manage directly its own piece of content by using services exposed (e.g. vary the asset metadata or ingest an epg variation) or control all the content life-cycle.

Also, a Service Delivery Network could be used to give the content provider the possibility to manage their own customer, even on the IP network that is viewed by the broadcaster only as another distribution channel. This is achieved always by services exposed that provider can directly access. So each TV broadcaster who views IP-network just as a another distribution channel can send grants relative to his own content offer to his own customer.

From the customer point of view, he has only one stb, can subscribe services from several providers (telco, broadcasters, content providers) and can choose to have separate relationship (e.g. bill) with each one or delegate the telco to manage all the offers with only one bill (the same of the telephony service)

So, many business models can be chosen: the same customer is an "IP" one for the telco, but also a TV one for the broadcaster. Another model could be a wholesale one with telcos selling a kind of a "white label" iptv to the broadcaster that will customize the experience he wants his customer to have. Naturally a traditional revenue sharing model could also be adopted.

The "platform" should also offer a DRM/CAS services and the efforts during agreements are to not have more than one cas on the stb. So broadcaster should send their clear signal to each distribution platform (the IPTV being one of them) leaving the encryption step to the distributor (Telco in this model).

The aim is to find in every scenario a model convenient not only for telco but also for broadcasters and providers that can use IP network as an additional distribution channel. For Telcos this is the best way to compose a complete offer giving the customer only one box: dtt, iptv, and with an hard disk, also a home NAS.

Clearly, the more the system has appealing to attract customers coming from different realities, the more telcos can attract ADV investments. But the market is continuously changing, and new trends must be followed since now. Not only traditional TV customers, used to interact with TV set only by changing channels, but also users who wants to combine the usual TV experience with a "2.0" one e.g. remaining in contact with communities, chatting, sharing contents, video-calling etc.

And IPTV is the most natural way to merge these services and give customers an integrated experience. This is the way Telcos will follow, enabling their platform also to be open to "add" service as market will require them. The aim is to attract again to TV a lot of younger people already used to interact with web oriented services while bringing near the Internet services the more traditional TV customers.

Francesco Calonico is a Broadband Services & Multimedia Engineering specialist in Italy for a Telecom provider