IPTV is the recent technology that is attracting everybody's attention. IPTV is part of triple-play services being provided by telcos and has given a change for telcos to survive. Though, IPTV is the biggest buzz now-a-days, the questions is whether IPTV make sense in India.
I guess not. At present in India we are struggling to get sufficient bandwidth speed. To get unlimited downloads with speed around 256-512kbps, it would cost above Rs 1000 ($25) per month. The connectivity is not reliable and peak speed can decrease further. In other words, the broadband connections are pretty unsatisfactory. Cable TV operators provide television channels of good quality at the cost of Rs200-Rs300 ($5-$7.5) per month and is significantly less than what we pay for a broadband connection.
Users are used to high quality television channels and to get that equivalent quality with similar channel switch speed, it would take arounf 30Mbps for IPTV connection with MPEG2 stnadard. With the evolving standard, MPEG4/H.264, the requirement can be significantly lower. However, it would be at least 2-5Mbps.
With the broadband penetration in India being very low and its growth story being not as strong as that of mobile phones, the bandwidth cost has not reduced significantly and will not reduce significantly in future. According to current BSNL tariff, to support consistent 2Mbps of data, it would cost around Rs9000. Therefore, it is quite clear that the telecom providers have to go a long way to provide IPTV service at a pricepoint similar to the cable TV service. For a primary cable-TV user, high cost of broadband connection would be a big deterrant. While for a primary broadband user, who uses perhaps 256-512Kbps, it does not make sense to pay such a high premium to get a very high-speed Internet connection for IPTV. So, in providing triple play to existing broadband users or moving the customers from cable operators, triple-play is not yet a strong story.
In USA, the story was different because cable TV and DSL connections were of equivalent price (~$50).
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