I'll start by saying that I'm biased. I ditched satellite and cable a little over a year ago in favor of internet TV. I upped my bandwidth to the max available, subscribed to Netflix and Hulu plus, and bought a Roku.
Admittedly I'm not the average use case. I've never been one to avidly follow a show or wait excitedly for the next episode of something to come out. I'm also not much of a sports fan (meaning that I can't remember the last time that I watched sports on TV). These things, along with my geek tendency to make new tech work regardless of how much of a pain it is, and wanting to cut seventy dollars a month out of my budget made my switch a no brainer.
I went into it knowing that there would be shows that I couldn't get. CBS has infamously blocked it's content from anything other than TV and a PC Web browser. Those are the first pitfalls for the average consumer though. "No live sports?", "You can't get this show?" and "That sounds complicated" are the first things that I hear. The first two would be simple enough to fix with cooperation from content creators, but first they have to decide that it's in their best interest. The third is just a design question. With enough market interest there's always someone willing to invest the R&D capital to make an attempt at a better design. I think that there's another, much larger, obstacle that IPTV has to overcome, the social aspect.
There is seldom a day that goes by without my interacting with someone around something on television. Most often it's sports, but the incredible popularity of shows like American Idol, Mad Men and Glee have started plenty of conversations about regular programming. That's where one of my favorite features becomes a shortcoming. Shows are released on a schedule, but they are watched whenever you want. Having everything on demand is really convenient, but it makes it hard to talk about what came on last night. Network and cable television schedules have kept people on the same wavelength for decades. That's a lot of social conditioning to push against.
The DVR started this trend toward on-demand viewing. Because of the Tivo we had to start thinking about spoiler alerts when talking or writing about TV shows. It's still not there though. We're still trained to think in terms like "prime time" and "channel guide". To be truly mainstream, IPTV will have to find a way to reshape this norm.
