iiNet plans IPTV service

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 25 November 2008 05:36

Your IT - Home IT

iiNet is planing to launch a suite of IPTV services tailored to enable it to offer something to all its customers: from those on a low speed resold Telstra ADSL service to those on ADSL2+ via its own DSLAMs.

Plans for the service, dubbed iiTV, were revealed by CEO, Michael Malone, at the company's AGM on 20 November. He said testing was already underway with a commercial launch scheduled for 2009 and that the service package would include tuners to receive free to air programming, an electronic programme ugied, PVR, on demand movies and TV shows and interactive features: all of which would be delivered free of download quotas.

iiNet CTO, Greg Bader, told iTWire that initial testing was underway with 100 internal users, but said there would not be a commercial service until the second half of 2009.

iiNet serves broadband customers by a number of different means and Bader said there would be a range of IPTV offerings to suit the technical limitations of these various connections.

'We break our customers in to five or six different classes depending on the level of control we have. If they are on our DSLAMs and on a high speed ADSL2+ service we have full control. At the other extreme we'll have customers on a 256k Telstra service...We will be working with Telstra to understand the capabilities of their network and the limitations of their product and our product."

He said that customers getting 5Mbps on ADSL2+ would be able to get high definition TV and those on 2Mbps, standard definition, but: "the complication comes in if you want to record one high definition channel and watch another at the same time."

Bader said that about half  iiNet's ADSL2+ customers in Sydney could get at least 12Mbps and overall iiNet estimates that about half the customers on its own DSLAMs would be able to receive its full suite of IPTV services.

For those less well connected, "The most basic service will be an EPG, PVR and free to air tuner with some pop up content and progressive downloads," Bader said "This would be something like TiVo but we see ourselves as being different. We want to have more control over our product."

According to Bader the platform iiNet has chosen for the service gives it the flexibility to produce these different packages and also to make changes very quickly. "The beauty of the platform we are looking at is that it means that the products we launch in 2009 will probably be different to those in January 2010." However he declined to provide details.