The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Talks on for Zee, Sun rights for IPTV

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Nov 23, 2007
ePaper

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Talks on for Zee, Sun rights for IPTV

M. Raghuram

BSNL, Reliance Communications draw up big plans to cash in on the boom

The IOL deal is expected to trigger IPTV boom for BSNL in Karnataka
IPTV service provides see huge potential
in tier-II cities

BANGALORE: Bharath Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (BSNL) and Reliance Communications Ltd. are gearing to cater for the needs of Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) subscribers in Karnataka.

BSNL Karnataka will be the nodal circle for signing agreements with all IPTV service providers. BSNL is a key node for broadband protocol in India.

Service provider India Online (IOL) is the franchisee for IPTV. It is negotiating with Zee and Sun TV for securing rights to their bouquet of channels. Once this happens the demand for BSNL IPTV will double in the State — from a monthly enquiry of 600 connections to 1,200 connections, said Chief General Manager of the BSNL Karnataka Circle T.S. Kuppuswamy.

Mr. Kuppuswamy told The Hindu that multi-pay channel bouquets would have to come to IPTV which would multiply the business prospects of the franchisee.

Mr. Kuppuswamy said the IPTV provided the advantage of video on demand to the customers. This meant the customer of IPTV had an entire range of services, including basic telephony, internet browsing, television in addition to the video-on-demand. He said the BSNL had to give the customer a dedicated bandwidth only for the video-on-demand. The value added features such as pay channels, tele-education and health consultation would be part of IPTV. The present BSNL network was capable of streaming all these services to the end user and the quality of sound and picture was assured, he said.

Reliance Communications and Microsoft had announced a strategic partnership to deliver IPTV. With Karnataka having the requisite infrastructure in place for IPTV, service providers were now concentrating on Bangalore and tier-II cities such as Mangalore, Mysore, Belgaum, Hubli-Dharwad and Gulburga.

In addition to video-on-demand, Reliance Communications planned to offer digital video recording (DVR), instant channel changing, and personal media sharing. IPTV subscribers would be able to watch popular standard definition (SD) content as well as high definition (HD) content — for the first time in India, said the company. The service would be launched by March 2008.

According to president of Home and Enterprise Business of Reliance Communications Prakash Bajpai, Reliance Communication had kept in readiness the integrated (wireless and wire line) and convergent (voice, data and video) digital network that were capable of supporting services covering over 13,000 towns and 5,00,000 villages.

Reliance Communication owned and operated internet protocol enabled connectivity infrastructure, comprising 1,65,000 km of fibre optic cable systems in India, the U.S., Europe, West Asia and the Asia Pacific region, he said.

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