Isn’t it ironic? A company puts out a press release with the results of a survey showing that over half of respondents are not familiar with the term IPTV. Yet they themselves don’t know what the term IPTV means.

The survey said that more than half of respondents didn’t know what IPTV meant, yet 92% have watched YouTube.

For the record: YouTube is not IPTV. IPTV means broadcast TV delivered over a managed network (or walled garden) using Internet protocols (IP). Thus the term IPTV. YouTube is Internet video. That’s because it’s delivered over the public Internet. Internet video is just a “best effort” delivery since it’s not managed.

But really, it’s not the fault of the company. The term IPTV is often mis-understood by lots of people. I would have thought, however, that a company doing a survey on Internet video would understand the difference.

Another way to distinguish IPTV from Internet video: IPTV is about delivering linear broadcast TV. The survey talked about Internet user-generated content and YouTube. It’s just not the same, and one way to keep the two sides different is not to mix up the terms.

The company that did the survey, WebsEdge, is a content creator that’s in the business of putting videos on the Internet. However, since they barely understand the difference between IPTV and Internet video, how can their customers? Or a regular consumer?

I had a call with Stephen Horn, the CEO of WebsEdge where he admitted that they may have mixed up the terms. But he held fast to the results of the survey and didn’t think he got anything wrong.

I think the press release and the survey are invalid and don’t make any sense.

It just makes me wonder how companies can put out press releases like this that claim any kind of validity.

I even am beginning to wonder about how the survey was conducted. Did they use scientific methods? The press release simply says:

“The survey, conducted in late 2007 in New York City, asked 225 residents about their attitudes and knowledge of IPTV.”

At the end of the press release it states:

“The survey was conducted in midtown Manhattan, New York.”

What kind of questions did they ask? When I asked Stephen about how the survey was conducted I got a vague answer that they’d get back to me. It’s been a few days, and I still haven’t heard anything about how it was conducted. Did they simply walk up to people in the streets? Who knows.

It doesn’t really matter, really. Yet another reason not to take this “survey” seriously.

Bonus: If you feel like reading it, you can see the PDF of the full press release here.

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