Primus Telecom gears up to offer IPTV

Stuart Corner
Monday, 08 March 2010 16:11

IT Industry - Strategy

Primus Telecom is putting in place the content and technology to enable it to deliver IPTV services to its ADSL customers, but CEO Ravi Bhatia says he remains unconvinced there will be sufficient demand to merit launching the service.

Bhatia told iTWire "We are doing a technology refresh on our DSLAM network. "We are installing upgrades to support multicasting. That will be completed in the next 60 to 90 days. We will be prepared for IPTV from a content and switching perspective to offer IPTV services".

Primus has DSLAMs in some 286 Telstra exchanges. Bhatia declined to provide any details of Primus' content sources, and said that no decision had yet been taken on a commercial launch.

"I am not sure of customer demand. It is clear that the future of broadband is video driven and video is bit-intensive but whether IPTV is going to be large screen video or small screen video or what mix of the two. That will be driven by the consumer and we cannot drive consumer demand to that extent."

He added "We are watching the market constantly. We are watching usage on our own network and we are engaging with our customers on a constant basis and all those together will give us the trend of what consumers are doing."

Meanwhile, rival ISP iiNet has been gearing up for months to offer IPTV services and is due to launch these by the end of March. (It too has not disclosed its content relationships). It already offers a considerable amount of download quota free video content through its Freezone and in its half year results presentation last month, said that Freezone usage had been growing steadily and in December 2009 had passed 10 percent of total customer Internet traffic.