It looks like Vodafone will shortly show its true colors in the war for a decent quadruple play option, starting where all of its quad play ambitions began, with a revamping of its German Arcor unit.
So far all that Vodafone has bundled has been mobile lines with landline based VoIP and internet access, in Germany with Arcor lines, in the UK with BT as a partner and in Italy through a deal with Fastweb. It is also working on a similar strategy in France. But until last week’s Cebit, Vodafone had not publicly said what we all thought, that it was preparing a trial for IPTV. The first will be a trial in the German town of Kassel with around 120 TV channels.
The system was discussed openly at CeBIT in Hannover and a working demo shown. It will go live in Kassel in May with 50 TV channels bundled with the basic service price and a further 70 premium pay TV channels. A VoD system will also be installed and the service will be available in 150 towns and cities across Germany by the end of the year.
When the system is launched it will run with a disk free set top, and later add network DVR function. In the same way that the US content companies have litigated to prevent nPVR (as it is called) it seems likely that the German content owners will do the same, as they have already undertaken some local cases against smaller suppliers.
Arcor now has over 2 million DSL customers in Germany and is extending its network aggressively and hopes it will reach 60% of the German population this year. Results for the first nine months were also out this week, with revenues up 12% on strong DSL sales to €1.57 billion ($2 billion) and improving margins.