Despite IPTV’s constant growth, its future is challenging to gauge. The reason is that IPTV directly competes with the even more popular OTT and CTV industries.
These industries are growing even faster than IPTV and are a force to be reckoned with. Although the future of TV undoubtedly lies in online video delivery, we have yet to see which technology will take the throne. As things stand right now, we can only make an educated guess.
How IPTV Compares to OTT and CTV
Although both IPTV and OTT deliver content over the internet, they use different technologies. With each of those technologies come different benefits and downsides.
IPTV operates in an isolated, private ecosystem, making it superior to OTT’s delivery method, which relies on open internet networks. Since OTT relies on your internet’s bandwidth, it is more prone to lag or connection breaks than IPTV. Similarly, this technology also enables IPTV to deliver higher quality content than you could get with OTT.
However, OTT has several huge advantages over IPTV, like better accessibility, a higher variety of video monetization models, and lower infrastructure and maintenance costs for providers.
Around 65% of users stream videos on mobile and TV apps nowadays in favor of TV or browsers. That means it’s more important than ever to be accessible to users across these devices, which OTT easily allows (through OTT apps).
At the same time, OTT monetization is more flexible. Providers can opt to monetize with ads, subscriptions, or even pay-per-view models.
Another massive upside to OTT is that it doesn’t require expensive infrastructure and maintenance. These lower initial costs are what make OTT more appealing to newcomers in the video streaming world.
With the above in mind, we can’t help but wonder if IPTV can stay competitive with OTT for much longer unless something drastically changes.