Tremendous opportunity for mobile TV and IPTV in India

This article was originally published in Convergence Plus and is reproduced here with permission.Written by Geetanjali Wadhwa & Pradeep Chakraborty and originally published on www.convergenceplus.com.

"Honey, I shrunk the TV," screams an advertisement hoarding from a leading mobile phone operator across India. Now, how is that possible? Quite simply, mobile operators believe that offering television content over mobile phones or 'mobile TV' will be the next leading revenue generator.

Hence, some of them have taken the advantage of higher data speeds offered by EDGE (enhanced data rates for 3G evolution) to provide mobile television content over some specific EDGE-enabled handsets. Not that the same content cannot be offered over GPRS or higher variants of CDMA. As they say, it is the download speed that matters!

Then, there is the IPTV service. This can be offered over set-top boxes that directly work with IPTV middleware solutions. Combined, both would add tremendous firepower to the operators' arsenal. Karthik Ranjan, director of product marketing at Amino, said: "Our experience is that the official forecasts greatly underestimate the market potential of IPTV in India. Depending on the success of the operators' deployment plans, it is quite possible that within two to three years, over 5 million subscribers could be receiving IPTV services in India."

Kim Lindholm, CEO, Fun to Phone Solutions Oy (Fun2Phone), noted that the potential of mobile TV/ IPTV services in India was equal to any other market. Fun2Phone delivers tools to enable interactivity on TV, and interactive program formats currently.

Big future for mobile TV/IPTV
Commenting on the potential of mobile TV/IPTV in India, Stephen Reeder, executive director, sales and marketing, ANT Ltd., said: "We are aware of a number of telcos already introducing IPTV trials in India.

Reliance Infocomm Ltd. has trials in progress and Atlas Interactive India has commenced its ambitious plans for 38 cities across India and is starting to develop a service for Delhi. There is definitely tremendous opportunity in India. If the service offering is compelling enough and the technology infrastructure can be established, the IPTV industry has a big future in the country."

This must be considered in the light of the already sizeable cable and satellite infrastructure with around 50 million subscribers and growing. The success of IPTV will depend, as always, upon the value proposition - on the subscriber services being offered compared with other services, and on successful implementation of the last mile strategies and sorting out any technology issues.

Reeder added the outlook was good, as the Indian government has recognized the importance of a modern telecom network. Consequently, the rapid growth of the Indian telecommunications infrastructure during the 1990s, combined with government support and investment has now created an ideal environment for IPTV services to flourish.

"The installed telephone lines can easily cope with the higher data rates required for high-speed broadband Internet access and the bandwidth usually required to provide high-quality television streaming over the same line," he noted.