IPTV will Take a country ride

MUMBAI: IPTV services, now available in metros and a few major cities, will soon be available in tier-2 cities and rural areas.

For, the department of telecom (DoT) wants BSNL and MTNL to expand their IPTV services in small towns and rural areas to shore up national teledensity levels.

The BSNL-IOL Broadband and MTNL-Aksh Optifibre combine will add more than one lakh IPTV subscribers in the next 18 months and will launch IPTV in Asansol, Durgapur, Siliguri, Kharagpur and other smaller towns.

At present, IPTV services have been operational in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Pune, and Delhi.

BSNL has a deal with IOL Broadband for launch of the services in 59 more cities, in which 7 cities will come into the IPTV fold this fiscal and 21 cities in the next. It launched IPTV commercially in Bangalore last month.

Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL), which operates in Delhi and Mumbai circles, has been targeting 50,000 IPTV subscribers by the end of 2008. It will be increasing its channels to 100 in a month. 

At present, MTNL has 225,000 broadband lines out of a total of 4.5 million fixed line subscribers in Delhi and Mumbai.

R S P Sinha, chairman and managing director, MTNL, told DNA Money: “IPTV is another source of revenue and MTNL has huge broadband customers who will gradually subscribe to the next generation television viewing.”

An analyst with a domestic brokerage firm said the total number of TV channels in India will touch over 400 in a year. Neither analog cable nor DTH will be in a position to carry all these channels. These channels will need to survive by providing aggregators for free if they can guarantee delivery to viewers homes.

IPTV is probably the only one that can do this as the wires are already in the ground and all the way up to consumer homes, the analyst added.

K S Choudhari, MD, Aksh Optifibre, said: “The customer base is rising every passing day and can provide set-top boxes free and monthly subscription may undergo a change once the subscriber base increases at a certain level.” 

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is a service where the customer can get digital TV signals (voice, data and video) through their landline telephone connections, rather than the traditional method of cable lines.

A consumer can access IPTV digital signals from their existing TV sets through a smart electronic device (SED) and a modem.

ITPV has features like time shift TV, which allows a consumer to store TV programmes and replay it at a convenient time, video-conferencing and video on demand (VoD).

MTNL service will be available at Rs 90 a month with options to select individual pay channels based on personal choice. BSNL subscribers will receive 104 TV channels at a monthly rental of Rs 250 plus taxes through their existing fixed telephone line.

Reliance Communications, Bharti Airtel, Tata Tele and HFCL Infotel, too, will launch IPTV services from next year.