Is an Optus box coming to challenge the FoXbox 360?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 31 May 2011 10:38

Your IT - Entertainment

Although Optus once had its own pay TV service called Optus Vision, Optus' vision for a pay TV seemed to go blind once it was all subsumed into Foxtel, but now a report says Optus is preparing a Telstra-like T-Box of its own.

The pay TV news of the past 24 hours has revolved around Foxtel coming to a new deal with Telstra over unmetering Foxtel on Xbox 360 content for BigPond subscribers, while also delivering six new BigPond TV channels.

Telstra certainly hasn't been backward in ensuring as much TV, music and movie content as possible over the past few years, separate to its 50% ownership of the Foxtel service, and has even been very proactive in delivering Mobile Foxtel IPTV to its Next G mobile subscribers.

Readers of my article yesterday will note my years-long complaint to Telstra that it seems unwilling to deliver Mobile Foxtel content in widescreen. The original excuse was that flip-phones and others with traditional keypads would see too slim an image if it was presented 'wide'.

But that's now no longer the case - most people have smartphones with large, iPhone-esque screens, perfect for playing widescreen content.

At least Foxtel on Xbox 360 users won't be so badly treated, they'll be suffering no 'chopped off' sides but instead will see an IPTV version of Foxtel in all its glory.

Yes, there are issues in quickly getting to watch Foxtel, plus there's no ability to rewind, pause or fast forward Foxtel delivered via Xbox 360, something Microsoft really should look at fixing.

Anyway, the news about Optus' box challenging Foxtel was delivered by ChannelNews, which claimed that 'Optus is set to deliver a brand new media centre box to up to 500,000 Australians in an effort to take on Telstra's T Box service, which has, in 8 months attracted over 175,000 users. What is not known is how Optus will get so many boxes to market.'

Continued on page two, please read on!