Broadband News had an interesting post giving some detail on a couple of recent TV over broadband announcements: one in South Africa, where Telkom is planning to trial a new triple play service within 3 months, and the second one in the UK, where BT is announcing consumer trials early next year.  BT will be yet another carrier to use Microsoft's IPTV, which is yet another testimony that Microsoft is slowly but surely the early winner in the IPTV sweepstakes, at least in mind share. 

But it is worthwhile pointing out that Om Malik had a great interview recently with Bill Smith (the CTO of Bell South, whom I had the opportunity to chat with at Supercomm) and when the topic of IPTV came out, here is what Mr. Smith had to say:

" We have had our eyes open on IPTV, and none of the problems you mentioned were a surprise to us. Our primary concern was scalability, and we are working with them. "

This obviously came after the Swisscom delay, and it just underscores that IPTV technology still remains a work in progress.  Some analysts are pegging the total number of homes connected to IPTV to be about 20 million by 2008 - not a big number, by any stretch of imagination.  Interestingly enough, Microsoft is going the proprietary way - pushing Windows Media 9 instead of MPEG-4 compression, despite the fact that many telcos are opting for the MPEG-4 codec.

For a more in-depth discussion of IPTV, here is an excellent resource: Roger Towne's web page.