IPTV sees slow growth
The IPTV market has made a big leap over the last five years, since FPT Telecom first launched IPTV service in Vietnam. MyTV service of VASC has got 500,000 subscribers, while OneTV of FPT Telecom 30,000 subscribers.
However, service providers have admitted that IPTV services develop very slowly. Nguyen Van Hai, Director of VASC, a subsidiary of the Vietnam Post and Telecommunication Group (VNPT), said that though VASC has an advantage of having an infrastructure system of its own, the company once met big difficulties in the first three years of launching MyTV service.
Some years ago, people did not have a deep knowledge about IPTV and they could not tell the difference between the traditional TV services and IPTV. Therefore, Hai said, VASC had to spend time to introduce its services to users.
Besides, as IPTV uses new modern technology, it is always very difficult to fix technical problems.
Sharing the same view with Hai, the representatives from Viettel and FPT Telecom, said that the biggest difficulties for them when joining the market are the poor knowledge of users about the service. FPT Telecom also said that the quality of services and customer care are the biggest problems for FPT Telecom’s OneTV service.
“If something wrong occurs with the Internet, customers would wait half a day or a whole day until the problem is fixed. Meanwhile, IPTV service users will not wait so long,” he said.
Meanwhile, experts have warned that if the infrastructure conditions cannot be improved, and IPTV still runs on the ADSL basis, IPTV will die, sooner or later, because the service cannot provide the perfect image quality.
IPTV and FTTx wil help each other develop
It is a growing tendency in recent months that network operators use IPTV on fiber network in order to take full advantage of the broadband and the stability of the transmission line.
In mid 2011, FPT Telecom launched "multimedia entertainment" service packages based on VDSL technology, integrating OneTV services in the ISEE package (15Mbps/1Mbps) and Ismart (18Mbps/3Mbps), which helps customers enjoy the whole family entertainment feature (watching HD films and listening to music when surfing on websites) on one connection.
On September 9, Viettel Telecom began providing the high speed FTTH TV packages to households throughout the country. With the package, customers can use the fiber Internet transmission line and the 10 Mbps Internet TV with the service fees of between 100,000 dong and 300,000 dong per TV.
Prior to that, CMC TI’s subscribers were informed that they can use MyTV service on the fiber network transmission of the network operator or of VNPT with FiberHomeTV and FiberBusiness packages and the speed of 5Mbps-20Mbps.
A representative of CMC TI said that though MyTV subscribers of VNPT all use 8-10Mbps bandwidth specifically reserved for the services, which is good enough for MyTV, fiber remains the most favorable environment for IPTV.
“In normal conditions, you can drive your car smoothly on a two-lane road (ADSL). However, you will feel tough when you have to go over a pot-hole. Meanwhile, you will not meet such troubles if you go on 4-lane or 8-lane road (FTTx- fiber to the x).
“IPTV and FTTx will help each other develop and bring benefits to users,” the representative of CMC TI said.
Buu Dien
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