Centre upbeat on IPTV rollout

MUMBAI: The entertainment industry in the country is finally ready to take a big leap with the much-talked about IPTV soon entering living rooms.

Dayanidhi Maran, Union IT and communications minister, said the government is keen on rolling out IPTV or internet protocol TV across the country through MTNL and BSNL.

The service has already been rolled out in Mumbai and Chennai on trial basis and it is just a matter of time that MTNL and BSNL provide the service in these two states on a full-fledged basis.

Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) is already in talks with the government for forming a legal framework for internet and mobile media, which would smoothen the roll out of IPTV in the country, said Neville Taraporewalla, chairman of IAMAI and country head of Yahoo India.

The government has set a target of building a base of 20 million broadband users by 2010. This will also increase the number of IPTV users, which is being touted by the IT minister as the biggest revenue generator in the coming years.

The industry will also see the entry of private player like Tata Teleservices, which is expected to start offering IPTV by October 2006. The company has tied up with US-based Viva Television for the venture.

Rajesh Sawhney, president, Reliance Entertainment, said, “2006 will be a landmark year for the industry, with DTH, IPTV and 3G services gaining ground.”

Meanwhile, the government is working on a local language browser for computers to translate English text into 13 local languages.

The cabinet has already approved the local language browser project and will be available in the next 3 years. It also has plans to set up one lakh kiosks in rural areas and villages by the end of 2006.

“In order to increase the penetration of computers and internet, the government has to focus on rural markets. At present, only 5% the Indian population can read, write and understand English. In order to popularise internet usage in the rural markets, we are developing a browser which can translate English contents into a vernacular language, Maran added.

The benefits of information technology can reach the common man in India only when the digitised information is available in all Indian languages.

Also to enable wide proliferation of computers and internet, PCs enabled with Indian languages should be freely available to the general public, said Maran.

The department of telecommunication in April 2005 released fonts, e-mail client, optical character recognition (OCR) software, spell checker and dictionary in Tamil. Similarly the Hindi and Telugu software tools and fonts were released in June 2005 and October 2005 respectively. Software tools and fonts in Punjabi and Urdu will be released shortly and all Indian languages would be covered by next year.