Posted by Varun Aggarwal
Airtel today announced its triple play service offering-providing Internet, telephone and IPTV through the same wire for NCR customers. According to company spokesperson, IPTV can provide a truly interactive experience, not available in dumb DTH services. My question to him was, what are the services that you’re offering that you think are not available on DTH. Being a marketing guy, he didn’t have much to say other than offering me another sales pitch, so here he goes, “We’re offering features like booking movie tickets on TV, ordering pizzas, ability to watch your favorite shows anytime within 7 days of broadcast.” For God sake, that wasn’t the answer to my question. All these services can be offered even on DTH, so what’s NEW in this! As a matter of fact, Tata sky already offers recording facility apart from many similar features.Then why would I pay additional money for watching channels in much lower video quality than my current DTH connection!
People often assume than IPTV can offer a gamut of services that are not possible on DTH. The truth is, there are hardly any services available that cannot be offered on DTH and available on IPTV. DTH is by no means a dumb TV. Be it ordering pizzas, booking movie tickets, arranging video conferencing-everything is very much possible on DTH as well. Moreover, DTH is not restricted by broadband bottleneck, providing much better video quality than IPTV services on a less than 2Mbps line.
MTNL and BSNL launched their IPTV services over 5 months ago and it hasn’t yet taken off. Though Airtel is offering attractive packages at the moment, the quality of service still remains uncertain. IPTV has been a failure in many countries. Let’s just hope Airtel has learnt its lessons and won’t repeat the mistakes committed by their global counterparts.
January 20th, 2009 at 7:28 am
Why do I get the feeling that the mistakes will be repeated? Whatever you can accuse our service providers of, it is not of learning through others’ mistakes!
January 23rd, 2009 at 10:50 pm
I am confused, r we trying to compare an apple to an apple from the customers perspective where in in both cases customer has a remote control for his TV/set-top-box in hand, or are we comparing the two technologies or Wire-less versus Wirelne.
Or are we comparing the modulations…..????
Not sure… may be some one will enlighten me.
W.r.t. MTNL and BSNL — both these organisations have MPLS network ready (I presume a part of the same is also being used for IPTV), if they use the right technology or atleast make-up thair mind to test something new, then the entire existing TDM network can be simply accomodated on just 1/10th of the MPLS network. Also a lot of other services can be put-up on the same, including the backbone for mobile networks.
But from these organisations who cares…..
January 24th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
@DPS: We’re only talking about the technologies availble from the consumer’s stand point and not so much from the technical side. As far as the technical aspects are concerned, both MTNL/BSNL have the right infrastructure in place and as you rightly pointed out its more about how they implement it…