Consumer Services: Foreign Pictures

In the United States, telco residential video deployments have been limited mostly to small, rural areas. That's not the case in Europe and Asia, where several good-size installations recently have hit the streets.

Probably the most notable is Softbank Corp.'s Yahoo! broadband ADSL rollout, which, in Japan, includes video as part of the voice, video and data bundle. Peter King, director of the global broadband practice at consulting and research firm Strategy Analytics, says the company in October launched a cable TV offering based on Samsung set-top boxes. "The excitement there is they also have the Yahoo! ISP community to aim at," he says. "People have widely predicted this will be the widest installation in Asia."

Softbank/Yahoo! has been hooking up 10,000 customers a month to the service, says Ivan Verbesselt, vice president of broadband entertainment over DSL and head of DSL marketing at Alcatel.

King of Strategy Analytics says Europe and Asia initially will be the dominant markets for telco-provided residential video service, and the United States will be third.

Elsewhere in Asia, King says, The Contents Co. in October began delivering video services in South Korea over an Ethernet-based fiber network. In Europe, Sweden Bredsbandbolaget (B2) rolled out fiber in Sweden over which it's offering IP-based video services. Meanwhile, in Milan, e.Biscom's FastWeb has 10mbps fiber-based connections over which it's delivering video on demand, broadcast and network-based personal video recorder services. There are also at least a couple of telco video deployments in the U.K., one that has an on-demand content provider called Frontrow offering services over networks run by Telewest Broadband and ntl Group.

King says the worldwide telco-based residential video market won't take off as a whole in big numbers until 2004 or 2005. Meanwhile, he says, "the whole world is watching these examples."

Next Level's Geoff Burke, director of marketing services, says there's also plenty of action in telco-based video here in North America. He says Next Level alone has 50 customers providing video over copper to about 140 cities in North America, with many of those deployments in relatively large cities.

For example, he says, in Canada Manitoba Telecom services passed at least 10 percent of Winnipeg at the end of 2002, with plans to roll out to the rest of city this year. Manitoba Telecom offers 200-plus channels of digital TV (with three streams per set-top), and includes high-speed Internet services as part of the bundle. "We have an Internet port in the back of our gateway," says Burke. "We also have on-screen caller ID and on-screen message waiting." Tailored local weather and other local fare is also part of the telco's package.