Telstra, Australia’s incumbent telco, is testing a broadband-connected set-top box called T-Box that will let its 2.3 million broadband subscribers watch TV shows, movies, sports and other Internet-delivered videos on their TV sets. They can also use it as a DVR to record HD and SD TV shows that local TV stations broadcast.
T-Box bypasses the PC like Apple TV and other digital media adapters from the likes of Roku, Vudu, Netgear and Linksys. France-based Netgem makes the T-Box (we mentioned it in passing last week). It’s a combination of digital terrestrial television (DTT) and IP (Internet technology) which receives Australia’s free over-the-air SD and HD channels as well as IP-delivered live and on-demand programming from Telstra’s BigPond TV and BigPond Movies services.
Its DVR has two tuners (watch one channel while recording another) and a smallish 320GB hard drive. Telstra group managing director of product management Holly Kramer said T-Box gives users “unmetered access” to the seven BigPond TV Internet channels including live news, sports and online music, all streamed over the broadband connection directly to the TV set.
A seven-day onscreen program guide allows users to schedule recordings of over-the-air shows up to seven days in advance. The guide is also used to download and rent movies from BigPond Movies.
Netgem managing director Christophe Aulnette said the company’s goal is to help telcos like Telstra offer solutions that combine the best of TV and the internet. Tests with a few hundred Telstra broadband subscribers are to begin by year end in Melbourne. Telstra recently completed deploying its HFC-based combination fiber/coax broadband network to about 1 million homes in Melbourne. Cablecos use HFC network technology and, with the new DOCSIS 3.0 technology, can provide broadband speeds up to 100 Mbps.
Telstra product group managing director Holly Kramer told CommsDay that T-Box will also work satisfactorily on broadband networks with speeds as low as 1 Mbps to 1.5 Mbps like the copper wire based DSL. Kramer said Telstra plans to launch T-Box in 2010 nationally over both ADSL and cable networks. She said it works on any network. The device is also expected to have built in wi-fi, allowing it to stream videos wirelessly to other devices in the home.
Telstra’s BigPond Web site already offers Australian Football League and rugby games plus other live sports to PCs. The sports will have their own channel on the T-Box but games will not be shown until 12 hours after they occur. The company said T-Box will offer more on-demand movies and TV shows than other boxes including Foxtel’s iQ box and TiVo’s Blockbuster online service.
“We will have more than 1,000 movies available for download at any one time,” Telstra Media CEO Justin Milne said. The company isn’t announcing the price of the box or the monthly subscription fee. It did say it’ll bundle it with its broadband service.
Milne said T-Box would not compete with the Foxtel pay-TV service or over-the-air broadcasters – a rather strange statement. Some think the much discussed government mandated Telstra breakup may require it to sell its 50% ownership in Foxtel.
Kramer said the T-Box is more about Internet-based content rather than the premium channels that Foxtel offers and so is unlikely to offer any of the channels that Foxtel offers. She said, “We are working with Foxtel to bring, over our broadband network, their on-demand content to the IQ box.”
Kramer said Telstra’s “strategic intent” is to sign more online video services for the T-Box, presumably meaning the likes of YouTube, Blockbuster and Netflix. Back in the States, Sezmi last week began testing a hybrid pay-TV DVR that receives pay-TV channels like CNN and local TV stations’ broadcasts of the major TV networks plus Internet-delivered free and pay-per-view TV shows, movies and free online video services like YouTube.
Consumers won’t accept converged digital entertainment until the user interface is converged and bypasses the PC. Unfortunately Telstra’s T-Box lacks the premium pay-TV channels and access to, at least for now, online video services such as YouTube and Netflix. It would seem that every pay-TV and broadband service provider would, sooner rather than later, build the Internet capability into its set-top boxes and integrate the Net into their menuing systems.