The IPTV revolution is apparently just around the corner, according to Om Malik, but as I’ve said before I think the form of the revolution is going to be quite a bit different than people are expecting.

The real boom will have less to do with the mechanism of content delivery and more to do with the content itself. I’ve mentioned Basic Brewing Video before as a poster child for what I mean, and I am still confident that BBV and its ilk are the real future of IPTV. Here’s why I think so:

IPTV, as described in the GigaOm article, is simply another method of conveying the same content we’ve always had to the consumer. It is another alternative to traditional broadcast television and joins a crowded competitive field with players that have been striving for years with one another. There don’t appear to be compelling features being delivered in IPTV via-corporation that aren’t already available from cable providers.

What sparked the revolution in cable television was the arrival of entirely new forms of content, previously unseen before. Premium content, pay-per-view content, clear signals regardless of weather were what sold consumers on cable. The real IPTV revolution will be all about interesting “niche” content that uses the accessibility and low cost of Internet distribution to lower the barriers to entry. Home brewers will be able to latch onto communities of very specialized interest. Skate boarders will have their own community distribution channels that are exclusively their own. Programmers will feed their own content channels.

And this will all be outside of the traditional commercial structures that content distribution companies, who themselves sit on top of the cable, satellite and broadcast companies, currently operate within. The revolution is already on, it’s been going on for years, and while it’s going to peacefully coexist with its traditional neighbors, the consequences are going to catch everybody by surprise.