Telefonica O2 Czech Republic Launches Pilot Operation of IPTV

July 19, 2006 - Telefonica O2 Czech Republic has launched a pilot operation for Internet protocol television (IPTV), offering the firm’s employees around 30 programs, including the opportunity to download films on demand, during the first phase. The offer includes Czech and Slovak channels, along with news, documentary and children’s channels. There are about 250 films available for download. At the same time, the pilot operation will test the sales channels of these services.

The company wants to expand coverage progressively in the same manner as it has been doing for broadband Internet, which has gradually become available to 90% of all fixed telephone lines over two years.

Telefonica O2 Czech Republic will begin offering television through fixed telephone lines in the third quarter of 2006. It will be possible to watch television in the MPEG4 format. In order to preserve the comparable quality and the same resolution as digital television, half data stream is sufficient in comparison to the MPEG2 codec. The operator is thus able to work with a data stream of around 2.8 Mbps speed, while the speed is around 4-5 Mbps for digital broadcasting.

Because of the upcoming offer, Telefonica O2 Czech Republic is gradually launching the new ADSL 2+ technology, which will more than double the current speed of fixed telephone lines. The new capacity will thus be fully used for IPTV.

The operator adopted the service from its parent company Telefonica, which has been offering it commercially since 2004 under the name Imagenio. In Spain, 300,000 households are using it at this time.