The analysts at Gartner recently informed that there will be an increase by 64% in the current year of 2008, in the worldwide subscription of the Internet-based television platforms as it is about to reach to near about 19.6 million subscribers this year. 

Since Western Europe is seeing the largest number of rise in the IPTV subscribers and North America is being considered to be the largest market for IPTV revenue, the worldwide Internet protocol television is expected to reach the revenue up to $4.5 billion, up 93.5 percent from a year earlier. 

The forecast says that in 2008, 1.1% of households worldwide would be using IPTV, and this figure would rise to 2.8% by 2012. 

Elroy Jopling, Gartner research director, reported, “The biggest change since 2007 is the rapid advent of new entrants making inroads in consumer video consumption and placing greater demands on IPTV operators to innovate.” 

However, the analysts sees portals like YouTube and Joost, social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook as tough competitors and further broadcasters launching new offerings such as the BBC's iPlayer catch-up service and Hulu owned by NBC and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp are kept under a close look too. 

Jopling also added, “Before 2008, the IPTV operators' emphasis had been to spread their footprint and effectively provide a 'me too' solution to cable and satellite. In the future, especially in the developed markets, we will see an emphasis on innovation and differentiated pay-TV services.”

According to Gartner, IPTV is basically a managed broadband network which makes available high-picture quality television and video content to the user’s TV set through set-top box. This does not include the content made available over Internet or only to a computer.