If we are to believe what they say, then China is going to be the largest IPTV market soon. Microsoft seems to have delayed IP TV plans of many including AT&T and BT. France Telecom’s subscriber take-up seems to have slowed down a little while Telecom Italia is finding it hard to get the service launched. Even the trail blazer Fastweb admits to a modest subscriber number of 170k or so. But China also has certain challenges to overcome before it dominates the IP TV scene. An important issue is the proper structuring of AVS (China’s homegrown Audio Video Standard) eco-system there.

The Chinese government has understood that the MPEG-LA royalty scheme is a very expensive proposition for China. It has instead put its weight behind an alternative to MPEG-4 but the players will need to iron out the standards quickly because the more non-AVS solutions are deployed the more difficult it will be to backtrack. The IPTV vendors who do both MPEG-4 and AVS will do better simply because the customer has the choice. Envivio, for instance, has a working partnership going with all major Chinese integrators (Huawei, UTS and ZTE) with their AVS encoders and they are being trialed by all of the major Chinese telcos.