| What
this means in layman’s language and where does the
government-controlled
telecom company MTNL fit into the scenario? MTNL,
providing services in Delhi and Mumbai, has associated with Time Broadband to
provide IPTV at affordable rates to the telco’s consumers. The services are
slated to be commercially flagged off later this year. According
to Dev, apart from the telephony and internet services, a MTNL subscriber can
also subscribe to TV channels, which can be seen either on the consumer’s
PC or television set. The
charges for subscribing to over 100 channels and internet services are likely
to be in the region of Rs 400 per month (exclusive of charges for telephone usage). Time
Broadband, which in no way is connected to the Times of India group, did a trial
simulation of the technology in Mumbai on 14 January 2005, the day on which a
nation-wide launch of broadband was held by MTNL and its sibling Bharat Sanchar
Nigam Ltd (BSNL). On
21 November 2005, Time Broadband signed up formally with MTNL for providing the
content delivery network (CDN) and do content aggregation for MTNL to enable rich-media
content delivery. MTNL,
set up on 1 April 1986 by the government, has a customer base of approximately
5.92 million as on March 2006. The government presently holds 56.25 per cent stake
in the company. Time
Broadband, where Sujata Dev’s husband Amit works as the chief tech mentor,
has been initially funded by promoters and has received $12 million mix of equity
and debt from global investors to move into full-scale rollout plan to 600 tri-band
customers shortly in Delhi. Next
stage of integration would cover uni-cast or the interactive on-demand media delivery,
which is to be completed shortly. “In
IPTV domain, a major challenge faced by a operator is the integration of the CDN
components like middleware, content protection, video-on-demand services and head-end
encoding components with set-top box. We could successfully integrate the whole
system in past six months along with inputs from our technology partners,”
said Dev. A
unique aspect of the whole venture involving MTNL is the content protection or
guarding against piracy. The
content protection technology used by Time Broadband for MTNL’s IPTV service
is being provided by Verimatrix and is a mix of session-based water marking and
clone-detection capabilities. “Broadcasters
like Star, Sony and Zee have approved the content protection system of Verimatrix
as also major studios of Hollywood as a key defense against the vandalism of piracy
due to the forensic tracking, which is invisible but un-destructible,” Dev
explained. The
video-marking added to 128 bit PKI as per AES norms would offer threshold level
of protection to all content. The achievement of technical solution is one hurdle
crossed but the issues of Regulation and availability of volume based H.264 STB
with ‘session-based water-marking’ is still a challenge to be overcome
before commercial launch, Dev adds. However,
a major hurdle in rollout of IPTV services in India is the regulatory body Trai’s
present ambivalence on the status of such service. Telecom
Regulatgory Auhtority of India (Trai) is yet to decide whether to classify IPTV
as a television service or make it part of telecom. Both
MTNL and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (the biggest telecom service provider in India
in terms of reach) control over 95 per cent of last mile
connectivity in
India. The
remaining miniscule is with some private players, which are finding themselves
handicapped to introduce large scale broadband services in the country in the
absence of last mile connectivity. Though
the set-top box needed to access the MTNL Tri-band service is being imported by
Time Broadband for approximately $ 160, in the initial stages the boxes are being
subsidised to catch consumers. Time
Broadband would build and own all the elements of this massive city-wide content
delivery network with service delivery platform to operate uni-cast and multi-cast
services of rich-media, apart from critical sub-system and peripheral devices. | 
