Triple Play in India – Hype & Hurdles
Triple Play – Phone, Internet and TV(Cable, IPTV, DishTV) is the new buzzword amongst Indian telcos. BSNL and Bharti – Airtel are planning to introduce IPTV while Tatas has joined hands with Star TV to offer Tata-Sky DTH(Dish) service. Reliance Communications has announced mega plans through its subsidiary, Reliance BlueMagic but its still not yet clear if they want to provide either Dish or IPTV or both. DishTV which earlier obtained an order from TDSAT has now moved to the Supreme Court over Star TVs high pricing. Reminds me of the ugly cable wars of late 90s.
BSNL which started its piolt project in Pune is now expanding it to other parts of the country. It makes sense for BSNL to take the IPTV route via ADSL broadband because of the abundant copper cable network it has to reach the end customer. BSNL added 10 more exchanges to the existing 8 so that they have a central office every 4 Kms radius. However, Bharti-Airtel has very thin penetration of its broadband as well as land phones. Here is the questionnaire I have sent to Bharti-Airtel.
Looks like Triple play is doing extremely well in Asia while telecom executives are skeptical about it brining any revenues in the US. In a separate development, Tech Mahindra announced their plans to offer IPTV solutions to Indian service providers.
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[...] I am beginning to doubt about how IPTV can be offered at a price of just Rs300/Month. Airtel-Broadband’s DSL in Karantaka costs Rs250 for downloading 400MB of data. If you want the same quality of Audio and Video as that of Dish TV, I atleast want a speed of 512KBPs(with all complex compression techniques), 1MBPS recommended. Current bandwidth costs for 1MBPs line are way too high. Also, you cannot force a customer to opt for high speed expensive broadband and then push him into the bouqet of IPTV. I had requested the results of Bharti-Airtel’s pilot project on IPTV in Delhi and the request just got passed from one to another without reciving any response. This makes me wonder if the results were awful to be published ? [...]
[...] I have been covering the IPTV Hype in India since July. Questionnaire sent to IOL Broadband Limited(Partners for MTNL’s TriBand IPTV) and Bharti Airtel Limited were unanswered even after months of following up. Maybe they are not ready yet ? [...]