84% of IPTV service providers will have VOD platform on COTS by 2012

A survey of IPTV service providers carried out by iLocus reveals that 54% of the service providers already use COTS hardware as the underlying platform for VOD solutions. The service providers seem aware of the benefits and the apparent trade off involved. To most of them, COTS hardware issue is a classic debate of modular/mass-production versus custom solution.
 
Among the remaining 46% that use proprietary hardware, a huge majority of 30% will shift over to COTS hardware in the near future. That represents a major trend. It seems that only a minority of service providers will be using proprietary hardware for VOD solutions a few years from now.
 
Traditionally VOD soluitons started with some basic ingest and streaming capability. Now the VOD solutions used by the service providers are taking all sorts of roles like nPVR type applications, and CDN etc. The proprietary hardware – for a majority it seems - therefore looks inappropriate in the network because service providers had not planned for all those