Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
According to market researcher, Ovum, telcos' expectations from TV are starting to outstrip the reality what the will be able to achieve by a considerable margin, as a result in part of being "egged on" by vendors.
According to Ovum analyst John Delaney, "Two years ago, when the latest wave of telco TV started to spread around the world, telcos were thinking clearly about why they were getting into TV (basically, to stop cable operators taking their broadband customers away from them), and what means their customers had for receiving TV services (in most cases, ADSL on a fairly long local loop). These facts formed the foundation of telcos' TV strategies, resulting mostly in plans to offer mainstream broadcast TV as part of a modest triple-play package."
Delaney claims that telcos are now being "Egged on by the equipment supply industry [and] are starting to take a much more expansive view of what they should do with TV."
"Routinely, for instance, their plans are incorporating video on demand (VoD). All sorts of vaguely specified but invariably ARPU-boosting 'interactive services' are mooted. And now, even HDTV is creeping in to the array of features which, it seems, no self-respecting telco TV offering can be without."
Delaney contends that the things a telco can do with its TV service are fundamentally constrained by: the content it can get; by regulation; and most of all, the way in which their customers are connected to its network.
"It comes down to a simple fact: telcos are not broadcasters, and it will take a long time for that to change, if it ever does. Telcos must keep a clear view of what their strengths are, what their customers want to do and what their reasons are for getting into TV in the first place. It's these factors, not technology, which should determine telcos' plans for TV."
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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