Bharti Airtel is waiting for legal and regulatory clarity before rolling out IPTV services. Puneet Garg, GM IPTV for Bharti Airtel, speaking at the India Digital Networks Summit said that the investments in infrastructure have been made and company hopes to roll out services in a couple of months, beginning with a focus on North India.

IPTV had lots of technology issues to begin with, but a year and a half long trial has helped Airtel improve the product. Garg says that the copper cable infrastructure is enough to support IPTV - both in terms of compression and line. The real challenge is not technology, but content. However, there are still some issues with deployment - the laying of copper is expensive—commercially unviable—and mass deployment is a challenge; hence a need for local loop unbundling. Even with local loop unbundling, how will IPTV work where wireline penetration is low? The technology thus also needs to be tested on wireless, like in case of WiMax.

He has no doubts about the potential of IPTV (one wouldn’t expect otherwise, right?) - it’s interactive and the consumer gets a choice of whatever she wants to see, whenever she wants to see it. The biggest challenge, he says, is educating the customer - particularly the misconception that IPTV is dependent on Internet bandwidth.