Internet and phone provider TalkTalk is continuing to press ahead with its plans to launch a YouView based broadband Television ( IPTV ) service, TalkTalk TV (TTTV), in the UK next year (2012) and has appointed Agama Technologies to help monitor the service quality of its forthcoming product.

The move follows TalkTalk's related appointment of MediaNavi, a cloud-based, cross-platform and multi-screen content service, in January 2011 (here). By contrast Agama will add real-time monitoring of all streams (e.g. in the IPTV head-end) and can detect everything from packet loss to freeze-frame conditions.


TalkTalk originally planned to run two different spring 2011 trials of its TTTV service, which was later put on hold after it emerged that technical problems and internal squabbles between some of the Joint Venture partners had forced YouView to delay its launch until "early 2012".

Today's appointment of Agama Technologies suggests that YouView and TTTV are finally making some real progress. Indeed a good service monitoring solution would be vital for any practical customer trials and ISPreview.co.uk understands that TalkTalk is now very close to starting one.

However YouView's partners will no doubt be mindful of the recent Digital TV Research (DTVR) study, which predicted that broadband based IPTV services were "unlikely to ever make too much headway" in the UK (here). It'll be an uphill struggle to fight the establish competition for even a small slice of today's market. BT will also adopt YouView and some sources suggest that Vodafone are to follow.