Triple Play In India: Is IPTV Still Way Off?

Sify Chairman R. Ramaraj spoke about the IPTV market in India, in the recently held Q4 earnings conference call (we covered the earnings here)
He said (transcript of the conf call on India Stock Blog): “In order to offer good triple play, take IPTV, while we have the technology today in Sify to offer IPTV, we will have to give minimum a 4Mbps in that last line, for the customer to have some level of experience, the cost today that a customer pays is less than $5 for 256k and if we have to go to 4Mbps it will be something like maybe $1000 or so, on 4 MBPS, $1000 per year, so about a $100 or so a month in the current pricing. We don’t think 1) some of the DSL technologies currently can do it. 2) I don’t think that customer can pay when the cable to him about 100+ channels comes at $5 a month. So while triple play is exciting, the bandwidth prices are prohibited, some of the technology is being used by competition, we’ll not allow that to happen quickly. So, we don’t think that is as much a threat. The not-so-good news is it’s not yet an opportunity for us either in the near-term because the bandwidth prices are still not competitive.”

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