Television via the web, or IPTV, gets people all worked up.
Not just in arguments about whether TV that is so ubiquitous is good for anyone or because it poses a genuine threat to conventional transmission pipelines, be they terrestrial, cable or satellite.
There is also a debate raging about where IPTV is most likely to succeed.
Will it be early adopter Asia, home to the world's most successful commercial deployments‾ Or will the developed world overtake when Asian broadband connections limit growth‾
Hong Kong's dominant fixed-line telecoms operator PCCW has rolled out its own technology and its own brand, NOW Broadband TV, and has become the IPTV industry's sexy success story.
While the company's TV moves might have been seen simply as a better way of selling broadband subscriptions than a plain vanilla fast Internet connection, PCCW developed its own set-top decoder and delivered a service with telephone-like reliability. That put it in head to head competition with three cable TV providers and it now licenses its technology to other broadband players.
To the channel and content owners PCCW demonstrated that the Internet is actually less susceptible to piracy than cable, in part because each STB is only receiving one channel at a time. And it delivered on a sales pitch that stressed content and an a la carte channels menu, rather than technological differences. NOW's bid to acquire exclusive content (including HBO and ESPN) has helped bring it over 600,000 subscribers and put it in a position to overtake cable market leader iCable by 2009, according to researcher Media Partners Asia. It also means high programming costs. Unit has yet to turn a profit for PCCW.
In Japan, Softbank's BBTV has over 200,000 subscriber households and is adding new ones at the rate of 18,000 a month although how many are paying is open to debate. Without the same population limitations as Hong Kong, BBTV could soon become the regional IPTV leader.
Asian IPTV has proved two things already, first that the technology works and second that the public is largely technology-agnostic. That is less true of regulators. Big question is whether China, with its even larger population and 10% economic growth rate, will join the IPTV leaders club or whether South Korea will prove more fertile ground.