UK Edition
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IPTV, while making in-roads in emerging markets, has got off to a stunted start in the UK. A tough pay-TV market and an absence of capable networks are factors leaving little room for manoeuvre. Inuk CEO Marcus Liassides acknowledges the problems and his company is presently limited to serving about 50,000 student bedrooms. However, he believes the firm, which has secured £9.5m in funding, has shown what is possible. Now Liassides is looking towards bringing IPTV to the masses.
Welsh-language broadcaster S4C and a successful entrepreneur invested in your technology this week - what attracted them?
"There are quite a lot of people with some good technology out there, but our value is our ability to demonstrate it within a marketplace. What we've been able to do in the student market is to prove both the technical implementation and the business and commercial model."
What form of IPTV service are you offering?
"There is a lot of confusion between web TV and IPTV. What we do is definitely IPTV - it is a full TV replacement service, to either set-top boxes or to PCs. It is full screen, full resolution, with electronic programme guide overlays, in the way we expect TV to be. On top of that we have all the channels that a consumer would expect to see - we are a TV platform in its entirety."
You have primarily been delivering the service to students on PCs. Why is this?
"We actually built the solution for the set-top box, because most IPTV deployments around the world are with set-top boxes. We then took those to universities and they said, 'Fantastic, but none of the students bring TVs to university.' That posed a problem... We took some bright minds and developed STB emulation software that literally changes the PC into an STB.
"We didn't have to make any change whatsoever to our infrastructure or headend - the PC or Mac acts exactly like an STB does. We still do deploy to STBs and if a student wants one they can buy one from us (presently for around £80), but the primary way of consuming it is downloading a free piece of software to their PC. We feel the STB will become increasingly important in the residential market."
What are your plans for tackling the residential market?
"We announced a five-year deal with Cable & Wireless last year that rolls this solution out nationwide across their LLU network and we are in final tests to launch that very shortly. C&W cover about 70-80% of the UK by population - it is a national, gold-plated network that was massively over-architectured during the dot-com boom.
"In the short term we are still going to focus on the student market, but now on students living in private homes as well, which takes our market to about 5m. At the moment Sky and Virgin are fighting a battle in the consumer living room, but we believe there is potential elsewhere. We are right in the depths of final testing [the residential service]. We are taking orders from live trialists and making lines live now."
What are your plans for further expansion?
"A lot of people focus on what we have done in the student market, but that is one step to the residential space. Another aspect is allowing other service providers to provide their own IPTV service using our technology, under their own brand. These guys want to have a TV offering yet they don't have the cash, the time and the expertise. We can take them effectively a TV business in a box. Then in the long term we may see Freewire (Inuk's own TV service brand) broadening its reach to the mass population."
A lack of capable networks and residential connections have been cited as a barrier to IPTV's development in the UK. Will this present a problem to you?
"The reason we selected C&W is that they have unbundled their own network and therefore moved to a next-generation network sooner than BT. BT's current network does not support a protocol called multicast which is very efficient for delivering linear TV. Hence the reason C&W are very excited about this, because it differentiates their network... I know C&W, with this initiative and others, are keen to expand their LLU network as well. We look forward to working with them and identifying which areas need to be next.
"There is talk that BT, with 21CN, may enable multicast, but they have not confirmed it yet. At that point we would be able to roll our services over the BT network. The absence of multicast limits any other ISP from delivering a live service, which is why they're focusing on on demand (for example BT Vision)."
Even with the C&W network, will bandwidth limit your ability to offer high definition content?
"We are already trialling with HD and from a service perspective it is very straightforward. I think in the UK in the medium term we are going to struggle with the amount of bandwidth that homes have. In the US, Sweden and Korea they are lying fibre quite aggressively, so they can get 100Mbps to the home, and you will never have to worry about bandwidth again. I think we'll be able to do HD in a smallish trial environment but I think rolling it out is going to be challenging, just because of the nature of ADSL."
What is your view of the prospects for the extension of fibre towards the home in the UK?
"I think it is inevitable but quite clearly BT, though they are heavily regulated, have a tight control over their network and the development of it. I think we will certainly be held back as a country if we don't jump on the high bandwidth bandwagon. I think it is inevitable that it will come, but so far it looks like BT want to squeeze every dime out of their network."
