The Indian telecom industry is expected to see an increase in the broadband usage due to IPTV services. According to various telecom experts, who were gathered at the 3rd International Conference of 'IPTV India 2008', the change would come with drop in the cost of content and the end user terminals. "The entire communication is set to move from voice base to video base giving the masses the power of the button," said Vijay Yadav, Managing Director for India and South Asia, UTStarcom while delivering his key note address.

According to telecom experts, with the advent of IPTV services in the country, content will become interactive and the consumer will be able to exercise control over what type of content as well as when they want to view this content. The shift in this content will be from voice base to video base, giving masses the power of the button. 

Usha Rajeev, Leader, Telecom Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers  said, "The service operators should seek to create an eco-system covering exclusive content of high quality and affordable cost to build a successful business model with IPTV." 

The ability to edit the video and view it when or where one wants would be among the wide range of capabilities IPTV would offer to the customer. This range of interactivity will make IPTV popular and give options to play with the menu.  

Yadav mentioned that 'Tele-education with options for students to choose what they want in a single class room' would revolutionise education. By making available to people the documents they need, IPTV would make governance really popular. This would help bridge the digital divide, he further added. 

The question whether service providers were ready for the change that IPTV will bring, was one of the issues discussed at the seminar. T R Dua, senior director, COAI said that there was a need to address the regulatory issues in providing the IPTV service. He pointed that Korea had achieved 98 per cent penetration with broadband through use of IPTV.  

According to telecom regulator's advisor on converged networks, Sunil Kumar Gupta, the Indian customer was quite sensitive to price and broadband penetration was needed to be more widespread for IPTV to be available.  He also pointed out how the next stage in television programming, namely High Definition TV would be very safe over IPTV. Globally 103 million subscribers for IPTV were expected by 2011.