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IPTV comes to Africa with commercial services or trials in Senegal, SA and Morocco Despite low broadband penetration in many areas, operators have uncovered pockets of opportunity. Dugie Standeford reports on Telkom South Africa’s pilot and the work of Maroc Telecom and FT/Sonatel
The African nations, often saddled with poor or nonexistent telecommunications infrastructures, may seem at first glance unlikely candidates for IPTV offerings. Some have leap-frogged straight over traditional telephony into mobile communications. Broadband penetration and speed levels lag compared to those in other regions of the world. “African IPTV markets may also be hampered by the inability of consumers to pay for pricey content,” says Ovum senior analyst Annelise Berendt. Business models may have to look to other revenue streams such as advertisements rather than counting solely upon high end-user income. “Nevertheless, there are several well-developed areas where IPTV can be an economic proposition,” says Benjamin Schwarz, projects manager for France Telecom’s international IPTV content division. Since January of this year, services have emerged in Senegal, Morocco and South Africa. Morocco Morocco’s largest telecom and Internet operator, Maroc Telecom (MT), launched TV over ADSL on May 31, 2006. It offers three packages: Access, consisting of national channels and foreign news for 40 DH HT (EUR3.5) per month; Discovery, consisting of access channels plus sports programming, entertainment, news and music for 65 DH HT (EUR5.7) per month; and Prestige, which includes all of the channels offered via the Access and Discovery service levels, plus cinematic movie releases, adventure and sports programming for 125 DH HT (EUR11) per month. Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. provided the end-toend, MPEG-4-based IPTV solution. MT piloted the system during the 2006 FIFA World Cup football (soccer) tournament, and then rolled out more than 40 additional channels to 50,000 subscribers, Huawei says. The plan is to offer 200 channels and support up to 200,000 subscribers by the end of 2006. Senegal France Telecom (FT)/Sonatel’s commercial service deployed in June 2006 in Dakar and its suburbs, “where the infrastructure is well-developed,” according to France Telecom’s Benjamin Schwarz. It offers a basic ‘bouquet’ of free-to-air African TV channels, and a Pay TV package from Canal Horizon, in addition to Video on Demand (VOD) programming. So far, Sonatel has no competition. One regulatory concern, according to Luc Heripret, a consultant with France Telecom-owned consulting subsidiary Sofrecom, is that operators are not permitted to bundle other services with broadband access. The service runs on access control technology from Viaccess and Smartvision middleware from Thomson (formerly Thales Broadcast & Multimedia). Thomson Sapphire VOD servers and TANDBERG Television MPEG-4 encoders are also part of the France Telecom solution. Set-top boxes are from Sagem and Thomson, while Quality of Service supervision comes from Witbe. “We deployed in France during 2003 and have since had time to iron out the main bugs in the components and, more importantly, in their interactions,” says Mr. Schwarz, adding that today, MPEG-4 encoding is “still a leading edge technology and fine-tuning encoders and decoders for stable interaction has been difficult.” South Africa Telkom South Africa began piloting IPTV with around 200 users in January, says Lulu Letlape, group executive, corporate communication. If the trial is a success, the company aims to launch a commercial service using the Microsoft TV IPTV Edition platform. The programme is managed by a team from Alcatel that has been involved in similar deployments elsewhere in the world. ipTV News Analyst will continue to keep up with developments in Africa as they are announced. |
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