Wednesday, December 14, 2005

IZZI beats Lattelekom on IPTV

Izzi, the company formerly known as TeliaMultiCom, has invited journalists to a demo of its IPTV service on December 15. I don't know if I will attend. Unfortunately, my late uncle's second wife, a retired lecturer in economics at the University of Latvia, died last week and her funeral will be held tommorrow afternoon. As the only representative of the family (my parents live in the US) in these parts, I will be paying my respects.
In any case, it will be interesting to test the Izzi service, assuming it can be accessed from Lattelekom's HomeDSL. It also remains to be seen how much of a first mover advantage Izzi will get from this, and how much it will cannibalize Izzi's digital cable TV service, which it is also launching.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Juris,

My condolences to you.

Regarding Izzi's IP TV - I seriously doubt that they are launching it for their customers, at least not for those cable customers who already have digital. First of all IP TV set top boxes are at least 3 times more expensive as digital cable boxes. Second thing is that IP TV still has serious lags when you switch channels which might be unacceptable for regular cable customer.

So my thought is that they [IzzI] are qoing to offer IP TV to numerous IP providers in Riga, but there is also weak points in this - subcribers need real broadband connection, transmission network should have manageable switches to prioritise IP TV traffik and so on.

Anyway good luck to IzzI.

Anonymous said...

Well ... one will be able to watch IPTV on one's computer screens or am I missing something? --> No need for set top boxes
And are you sure that IP TV won't be only for company's customers, first ... Khmmm, launching this service for other ISPs ... wholesale of TV service, interesting.

Anonymous said...

I am afraid that this TV will require set top box just to be sure that IzzI gets its money ;)

of course this service will be offered to existing broadband cable customers, but I believe that main goal is to sell content to ISP's. That would be quite stupid to offer 2 similar [I'd say identical] services - digital cable and IP TV to the same cable customer.