Alexander Harrowell writes:
> For example: France Telecom's consumer ISP in France (Wanadoo) is
> pushing out lots and lots of WLAN boxes to its subs, which it brands
> Liveboxes. As well as the router, they also carry their carrier-VoIP
> and IPTV STB functions. [...]

Right, and the French ADSL ecosystem mostly seems to be based on these
"boxes" - Proxad/free.fr has its Freebox, Alice ADSL (Telecom Italia)
the AliceBox, etc.  All these have SCART ("peritelevision") TV plugs
in their current incarnations, in addition to the WLAN access points
and phone jacks that previous versions already had.

Personally I don't like this kind of bundling, and I think being able
to choose telephony and video providers indepenently of ISP is better.
But the business model seems to work in that market.  Note that I
don't have any insight or numbers, just noticing that non-technical
people (friends and family in France) do seem to be capable of
receiving TV over IP (although not "over the Internet") - confirming
what Simon Lockhart claimed.

Of course there are still technical issues such as how to connect two
TV sets in different parts of an appartment to a single *box.  (Some
boxes do support two simultaneous video channels depending on
available bandwidth, which is based on the level of unbundling
("degroupage") in the area.)

As far as I know, the French ISPs use IP multicast for video
distribution, although I'm pretty sure that these IP multicast
networks are not connected to each other or to the rest of the
multicast Internet.
--
Simon.