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Vodafone gears up for German IPTV launch
Jörn Krieger ©RapidTVNews | 02-09-2010
Vodafone has revealed that it wants to launch a new hybrid TV platform in Germany in time for the Christmas sales period.
At launch, the service will be available to 33.2 million households, corresponding with 83% of Germany’s households, and will aim to combine cable, satellite and IPTV in a single package with the STB automatically choosing the best user-selected reception method.
The Vodafone TV bouquet will consist of around 120 TV channels including more than 10 HD channels and a video library comprising around 3,000 titles, among them 100 HD movies. The hard disk boasts a 320 GByte capacity, capable of storing up to 140 hours of SD TV recordings or around 60 hours in HD.
With the hybrid system, based on an end-to-end solution provided by NDS, Vodafone is following a different strategy than the competing German IPTV operators Deutsche Telekom and HanseNet who base their offerings over broadband internet.
For TV reception via ADSL, Vodafone TV customers will need an internet data rate of at least 6 Mbit/s, for HDTV at least 10 Mbit/s. Video-on-demand content from Vodafone’s video library will be streamed to subscribers if sufficient bandwidth is available, otherwise the content will first be downloaded onto the hard-drive inbuilt in the box and then accessed from there. The company says that 2 Mbit/s will be sufficient for the download to take place.
Vodafone believes that it has a competitive advantage in being able to market its TV service to a considerably larger number of households than its competitors. That is, households which receive television via cable or satellite and only have a slow internet connection will have the opportunity to sign up for the offering without the need to upgrade their internet connection.
Using Vodafone’s box, viewers will in future also be able to subscribe to Sky Deutschland’s pay-TV offer via satellite. The electronic programme guide includes all programmes spread across the different ways of reception including the video library while navigation takes place through a single remote control.
The box contains two tuners, so that one channel can be watched while another one is recorded at the same time. Series can be recorded automatically if desired. Time-shifted television is also possible. The box is also configured to support 3D TV once Vodafone TV decides to release such content.
