SIBINTEK preparing move into Pay TV; plans IPTV trials this year in Moscow and St. Petersburg

Russian consulting and systems integration company wants to act as content aggregator and platform operator, partnering with local telecoms operators, terrestrial broadcasters and satellite TV including NTV-Plus

SIBINTEK, the Russian consulting and systems integration company that spans energy, transport and telecoms markets, is preparing to move into Pay TV using DSL or fibre-based IPTV networks. Two trials are planned for the autumn in Moscow and St. Petersburg covering “several thousand homes”, with ambitions for commercial launches by the end of 2006.

SIBINTEK will act as content aggregator and IPTV platform provider and is in discussions with a number of telecoms operators - including COMCOR - about using their networks for the service. The company wants to rebroadcast terrestrial channels and is confident of agreements with the main Russian broadcasters. We understand SIBINTEK is talking to the DTH satellite platform NTV-Plus about passing its content through the proposed IPTV system.

Sergey Kornikhin, general producer at the new technologies development center for interactive television within SIBINTEK, says the Pay TV service will launch with around 50 channels of broadcast TV plus movies-on-demand. There will also be an early taste of on-demand TV in the form of news-on-demand.

SIBINTEK is likely to market the service itself, develop its own customer care centre and use re-sellers to help retail what will be a full triple-play offer. SIBINTEK is deciding whether to seek an end-to-end solution from Alcatel or use OpenTV for its middleware and act as systems integrator itself, having been in discussions with both vendors. The company is also investigating codecs, hoping to use MPEG-4 Part 10 (H.264/AVC) for its video compression. The marketing focus will be interactivity and SIBINTEK will be competing against Sistema’s STREAM TV video-over-DSL service in Moscow, plus of course, cable TV.