EDID stands for "Extended Display Identification Data" and in IPTV solutions is used to provide detailed information on TV set capabilities and manufacturing information. HDCP ("High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection") is used for protecting high resolution content from being stolen by DVR. We typically count failed and successful HDCP connections. This data is usually reported to central server using TR-69 protocol and/or proprietary protocols like Agama.
The role of monitoring of above data is quite important. If you receive high number of HDCP failures from the field and you can correlate them with EDID somehow you can reproduce problems in lab environment. That's the first part of the resolution - you can debug specific TV set interaction.
First of all, you know the manufacturer ID from this data. In the past projects I faced many HDCP-related problems with some TV sets manufacturers (especially produced by Loewe) that had some weird HDMI implementation in place. Secondly, the manufacturing year and exact model information is provided. It's an important information as you can expect more troubles with standards compliance in older device models.
EDID data usually travels monitoring channel in original, binary format. Monitoring solutions help with decoding data structures and usually support some aggregation of this data (HDCP problems per TV set type).
If you're an IPTV expert you should watch your STB deployment compatibility level and pro-actively fix any problems found. It's much better to handle them by you than to loose some of your customers for your competitor who did the job better.