Vodafone Germany will be the launching pad for a quadruple play offering the company made clear at a mobile TV conference last week.
Speaking at the Mobile Broadcasting Forum 2008 in Amsterdam Roland Beckman-Kunz, SVP for Content and Digital Commerce at Vodafone told the audience that while it was not too interested in broadcast mobile TV it was certainly interested in merging its streaming mobile TV operations into simple bundles with the Arcor fixed broadband lines which it inherited from its ancient Mannesmann acquisition in 2000.
The Vodafone IPTV services was launched in Germany in January this year and in August the price was squeezed down to a very affordable €9.95 entry point.
‘We are about to launch a version of our IPTV system on PC,’ said Beckman-Kunz, ‘it will use Microsoft Silverlight video, and the same content will be offered on the PC, the handset and the IPTV system.’
Beckman-Kunz went on to say that Vodafone was planning to use the German experiment as a test bed for other countries. We know that Vodafone has access to a broadband ISP, either through ownership, or through partnership in each of Italy, Spain and the UK. In the UK so far it has failed to acquire a major broadband presence, but is working with BT.
‘One of the things we are working on is the ability to have the EPG for all of that content on your handset. I don’t believe that many people are going to watch many movies streaming on a handset, but I can accept that they would decide what they are going to watch on the handset and use it to plan or record their viewing for later,’ he said.
Only PCCW in Hong Kong and to a lesser extent Rogers Wireless in Canada, have unified content into a simple banded quad play offering in this way.
Beckman-Kunz justified all of this along with the use of existing broadcast mobile TV in Germany using DVB-T. ‘DVB-T offers a good picture and it works, but I would not say that we have had an explosion of customers take the DVB-T phone,’ he said, ‘it numbers in the tens of thousands.’ Battery life on these devices is about 1 to 2 hours watching TV, but if people watched more than an hour of TV in a day the battery would not last the rest of the day, he said. Currently the average viewing times are under 1 hour.
When the latest Arcor IPTV deal was announced it came in TV bundles with either 22 or 50 TV channels priced between €9.95 and €12.95. It already had a triple play option starting at €39.95 for VoIP, broadband at 16 Mbps and 50 TV channels. It will now open up the mobile dimension, and add Mobile TV and mobile voice. Beckman-Kunz said that the streaming TV might simply be added as a ‘premium’ meaning free for people that take the quad bundle.
Elsewhere in the saturated cellular markets of Europe, where Vodafone is strongest, it has never once hinted at a coherent strategy for its quad play, but this is starting to look like one. However it may take some time before the slow moving cellular giant gets this strategy out to the rest of Europe or further afield.
Beckman-Kunz said that while the company has experience of DVB-H (it operates a service in Italy) he saw no reason to go down the broadcast mobile TV route, and said that streaming cellular video was ‘indistinguishable’ from DVB-H and said that the company now used H.264 encoding and a 256 Kbps stream.
He also said that Vodafone was now creating its own coverage of the Bundesliga German soccer league, with its own voice commentary and that this is now available on all three screens, and people can pick their team from all the top soccer clubs and follow it across the three devices for a single price, getting team news, updates, player interviews and live games.
‘Customers numbers are in 6 digits (so hundreds of thousands),’ he said, ‘although that is because we have offered homes a free trial. But so far we have a high degree of customer satisfaction on our three screen strategy.’