“Right now, it’s wide open,” said Verizon senior product manager Jeff Harris, part of a panel at the Telephony IPTV summit. “It’s still too early in the game to put a stake in the ground and say ‘this is going to happen.’”

Along the way, Harris said he expects advertising models will change, although he -- and the other panelists -- couldn’t specify exactly how advertising approaches to IPTV will evolve.

Marc Le Clerc, manager of Ericsson’s IMS Expert Center, suggested that service providers will have to provide IPTV across different platforms, which will require vendors to cooperate on developing workable standards. Le Clerc said Ericsson’s studies have found that teenagers will want to seamlessly shift from watching IPTV on a cell phone screen to a large television screen.

Rex Wong, CEO of DaveTV, said it will be important for providers to allow users to get IPTV different platforms, but still be interactive in a “non-intrusive way,” especially if it targets desirable demographics like the 18 to 35 age group.

“This group isn’t watching TV now,” Wong said. “We have to engage in their behavior that is out there.”

Shari Barnett, director of Media Services at Microsoft TV, cited the video watching interests of one interesting viewer -- Bill Gates. She noted that in a email Gates told her he watched videos ranging from physicist Richard Feynman’s lectures to lectures on AIDS research as well as golf tournaments. Barnett used the example to illustrate the variety of programming the public will want.