Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) will look to roll out Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) services more aggressively across major cities in the State with most channels on the Sun Network set to join the IPTV bouquet from April.
BSNL's IPTV services had gone commercial with about 140 channels in October in Chennai, and later in Puducherry and Coimbatore, without the major Sun channels on offer. IPTV, which offers several interactive features such as movie-on-demand, was launched in partnership with MyWay services of the Smart TV Group.
“We have planned a major expansion campaign after we host most Tamil, Telugu and Kannada channels on the Sun Network,” a MyWay official said.
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IPTV will now feature 16 regional channels of the Network.
However, for IPTV users this could cut both ways. While they will have access to richer regional content, the pricing of the packages could be tweaked shortly.
The next phase of the IPTV rollout in Tamil Nadu will cover Madurai and Coimbatore. “We had to delay the rollout in these cities as we needed to enlarge the bouquet of Tamil content”, the official said.
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BSNL sources say that one of the reasons for the below-par performance of the IPTV segment had been the insufficient Tamil content. In the five months since it migrated to the billed platform, the IPTV subscriber base has only grown to about 1,500.
“We're now looking to raise the subscriber base to over 7,000 and have planned a major campaign in the months ahead,” an official said. The IPTV franchise is also expected to launch two new features soon. The “Time Shift TV” feature will enable users to catch up with any time programme that they miss on about 40 favourite channels (seven days of content is stored on a MyWay server for this). Another value-addition is the recording feature that will allow viewers to record their favourite programmes on a memory stick.
It is proposed to offer both features free for the high-end packages, sources said.