IPTV India scenario

I had my doubts about the feasibility of IPTV technology in India. I was looking at what the service providers in India were doing about that. Interestingly, contrary to the western market, where the telcos and cable companies are competing against one another in delivering triple play services (voice, video, data), both Reliance and Airtel are deploying DTH and IPTV as simultaneous distribution channels for delivering video. This has to do with current broadband penetration in India. Thecurrent  strategy would be to target IPTV for broadband users and DTH for the video customers. Based on the announcements in the leading dailies,  Reliance, BSNL and Airtel were all targetting IPTV launch for quite some time, but there had many postponements. 

One issue had been about obtaining content from the broadcasters at the same price at which the DTH service providers get the content. Government has recently accepted TRAI's recommendations. Appropriate provisions would be added in the policy to enable the IPTV and DTH service providers have equal footing ground in procuring content.

 

IPTV market worldwide is expected to soar in the coming years and touch probably $12-$14 billion by 2011. Currently Europe is the biggest market, and Asia-Pacific region is expected to have the highest growth in coming years. However, it would be interesting to see how much India contributes to that compared to other Asian countries like Japan, Korea. Broadband penetration in India has been extremely low (<0.3%) compared to mobile subscription (currently the number stands at 300 million and can reach 600million in the next five years, i.e., 30-60% of the population).  Some of the optimistic projections predict 20-30million broadband users by 2012. If we look at the current offerings of BSNL IPTV, ARPU could be around only Rs 1000 ($20. I have my doubts about IPTV QoE with current price tag and currently deployed technology). With the tariff remaining unchanged, it would be interesting to see the TAM of IPTV in India and the profits that the leading service providers can make. All leading service providers have already made significant investments. BSNL and Airtel are using UTStarcom's RollingStream products for streaming and Reliance has forged a deal with Microsoft.