Sometimes extracting revenues from a Tier 1 telco player can be like pulling teeth, slow and painful, and there can be no greater case for this than the 7 year battle by Microsoft Mediaroom to bring a sensible iPTV service to Bell Canada, which launched finally this week under the name Fibe TV. No not Fiber, though it has taken the laying of miles and miles of fiber to make it possible.
It was back in 2003 that a trial was announced between the two, at a time when Bell was mostly partnering with Dish Network Canada to provide its TV through the ExpressVu Dish Network. Those early IPTV trials were mostly with apartment blocks using VDSL and showed how most of Bell Canada’s network was in desperate need of upgrading, in much the same way that AT&T’s network needed its Project Lightspeed, to move fiber far closer to each of the homes.
But that wasn’t the only obstacle. Bell has wanted to own TV channels for some time and has courted, bought then sold a part of and finally reacquired Canada’s largest private broadcaster CTV for $2.9 billion, spending what was mostly borrowed money to do it, so that it owns content for its service, with the final stage in that deal finally going through only this month.
Meanwhile its regional ex-subsidiary, now 44% owned associated company, Bell Aliant has launched various experiments and partial services in both IPTV and Fiber to the Home in about half of provincial Canada.
Perhaps the thing that most got in Bell’s way was the failed acquisition of the entire company from public by a group of private equity funds, a deal which took up the majority of 2007 and 2008, led by the private investment arm of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, along with Providence Equity and Madison Dearborn, in a deal approaching $45 billion. That deal halted much of the infrastructure investment that Bell needed in order to be ready for IPTV, but the transaction finally fell apart in 2008.
So at least we can say that these delays have had nothing to do with the maturity of the Microsoft Mediaroom product line and can perhaps sympathize that Microsoft has finally had its long awaited pay day for this system. Or at least some of it.
As recently at last October we began to see internet TV moves by Bell, with the launched of a TV Everywhere style service called TV Anywhere, and yet still there was no proper IPTV system generally available and TV Anywhere was based around Bell TV content from the Dish satellite service.
Initially the new IPTV service will go on sale in Toronto and Montreal, reaching about 500,000 homes in the two cities. Bell is clearly not going to leave it at that, and hopes for a footprint of one million households by mid-2011. This must be how many customers it hopes for, because its fiber to the node VDSL2 footprint already passes three million homes and these are mostly in the Toronto and Montreal areas.
Fibe TV will then push on and be available to almost five million households by the end of 2015 the company says. Right now it is being seen as ‘complementary’ to the Dish based Bell TV, but come on, homes will have one or the other, rarely both, so while it may be nice for Canadians to have a choice, it’s another reason to sell Dish stock. Bell TV already has 2 million customers in Canada. However Bell’s build out is aimed clearly at taking business away from cable-based rivals Rogers and Videotron in large urban centers in Ontario and Quebec, so it won’t chase those Dish subs away too quickly.
Fibe TV will start life with 100 HD channels, 70 international channels, 1,000 VoD movies and Whole Home DVRs. Later this will stretch to smartphone content access, we are told, and it is pretty much established that this service will ride on the back of Motorola set tops, which have been used throughout the trials, so perhaps Motorola smartphones as well.
Bell is promising that every standard definition channel will also come with the HD version at no extra charge, that its set tops will have the processing power to record up to 4 programs simultaneously. There are no tuners in IPTV systems, so this limit is down to which processor you use in the set top and there are only three choices with Mediaroom Sigma, ST Micro and a Broadcom chip which so far has no design wins and may not even work.
Bell will shortly introduce a Remote DVR feature so that DVRs can be managed from any computer with an Internet connection or from your phone. The system will also have search facilities using program title, keyword or actor’s name ‘ in other words a pretty standard Mediaroom installation.
It was only in June 2010 that Bell Canada made public its campaign to CRTC, the regulator, to alter legislation demanding ‘regulatory symmetry’ in Canada, by which it means that it is just as easy in red tape terms, to sign TV customers from Rogers to Bell, as it has been in the past to steal phone customers from Bell to Rogers.
Another likely winner here is HPNA. The various Bell Aliant provincial IPTV services have all used HPNA over existing coaxial cabling multi-room IPTV delivery, which of course AT&T has also used, so we assume the Bell Canada installations will be much the same. IPTV at Aliant was launched in three of its six provinces using Motorola set-top boxes with CopperGate HPNA chips.