Convergence triple play strikes out
The triple play means providing customers with voice, video, and data (or phone, tv, and internet if you prefer). This week, I had a hands-on experience that made me shake my head.
I switched TV providers, from my local cable company to my local phone company, based on a sweetheart deal to move to digital TV from my stone age analog service. The deal comes as the phone company moves into video, offering freebies to carve share from the local cable monopoly.
The install went well, my shiny digital set top box joined my Tivo and other entertainment unit dwellers, and I embarked to explore the wonders of video on demand and granular control of channel selection.
My first foray into a VOD request crashed that shiny set top box.
My next foray into VOD revealed a decent top 10 list comparable to Blockbuster’s top 10 rentals - but selection evaporated after that. Oh, unless I liked ’steamy thrillers’. Softcore seemed to be about 40% of available titles. Given that a major motivation to upgrade was to improve our family experience, this didn’t bode well.
That same channel exploration revealed that there was no comparable community channel to the local cable company - not an issue for many, but for us we dedicate an entire weekend for the whole family twice a year to specialty programming rebroadcast through that local channel. Without it, we’ve got to bundle the whole family into the minivan.
My new DSL service came in at about 600kbps, a quarter of my middling cable bandwidth. A few calls with the phone company revealed that running TV over the same line as DSL bogged down internet bandwidth.
All was not well in convergence-land - instead of a triple play, we’ve got three strikes, and the phone company is out - we moved TV and landline over to the cable company, and free of the burden of video, DSL now flies at a decent 3300kbps. Looks like IPTV is too fat for decent performance on phone lines.
The real lesson is that telcos are still struggline to monetize existing infrastructure as legacy landline service fades in the face of VOIP and mobile adoption. IPTV may be part of that solution, but not at my house.
This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.