Is MultiChoice afraid of IPTV?
This morning I attended the First Tuesday breakfast session on IPTV. Rishaal from Accenture presented a global view of IPTV and whatnot and it was really boring. Next up was Jonathan Newman, head of strategy at MultiChoice. He effectively left the audience believing that IPTV would not be possible in South Africa until Telkom reduced the cost of broadband bandwidth as the current practice of Internet usage capping would lead to prohibitive costs for the consumer.
However he failed to clarify to the audience that IPTV over broadband will not affect your Internet usage cap as it will be a local-loop service and not a public Internet based offering. I also found his references to Telkom as the incumbent operator quite amusing considering that his company is the incumbent Pay TV operator in the country.
What really got me worked up though was a private discussion with him afterward where I questioned his statement that MultiChoice welcomes competition and enquired why numerous attempts from the community to establish a working relationship with MultiChoice for delivery of the DStv Electronic Program Guide (EPG) have failed. I was informed that MultiChoice doesn't plan on making the EPG content available as they see Microsoft Windows Media Center and TiVo-like devices as competition with their very own PVR decoder hardware.
In addition we were informed that MultiChoice plans to offer a hybrid solution similar to BT Vision whereby select content is available through a Video-on-Demand (VoD) system. From what I could gather the system would involve requesting content to be trickle delivered over satellite after requesting and I assume paying for the content through mobile technologies, presumably SMS. Naturally such a solution would be only applicable to those with a PVR decoder as a hard disk would need to be used to store the content while it is delivered. So much for on-demand, it might be faster to drive to a video store and rent a DVD, HD DVD or Blu-ray disc from the local video store.
Speaking on the topic of High Definition TV (HDTV), apparently we shouldn't expect HDTV channels from MultiChoice anytime soon. But we can expect DStv Broadband later in the year which will be delivered as a Web TV solution over the Internet - just in case we really do want to deplete our monthly Internet cap. Personally I think I'll wait for the Telkom Media IPTV offering next year and switch from MultiChoice without hesitation.
For this event to have been really worthwhile I would have liked to have heard from Telkom Media and some of the other players like SABC and E-TV.