Last week’s announcement that Hawaiian Telcom will finally emerge out of bankruptcy comes with a sigh of relief. As difficult as the land line business is, it would not be good for the consumer (and businesses in general) if the incumbent telecom provider were to go out of business. Not that the possibility of HT closing shop, like an Aloha Airlines, was any real threat. What was scary was the idea of a Sandwich Isle Communications purchasing them or worst yet, having the State government come in and run the shop. While the HT bankruptcy proceedings were taking place last week, the Star Bulletin reported that “Hawaiian Telcom is banking on the success of launching video and television services to become profitable in upcoming years.” This telco offered video and television service was originally called IPTV but now referred to as Next Generation Television or NGTV. It would be much like what you are getting on your cable TV but delivered over the phone line via IP or Internet Protocol. This got me thinking how viable is NGTV as a service offering. NGTV has been the holy grail for telcos dating back to 2006. When I worked for Hawaiian Telcom in 2006, they were talking about the triple play: voice, Internet and video. The challenge with NGTV is that it needs a lot of bandwidth, upwards to 50Mbps. Requirements could vary depending on what you want to deliver over the line. Copper wire, like the type that DSL runs over is distance limited. You would have to live right next to the central office in order to get 50Mbps. NGTV would be easily accommodated over fiber optic lines but it is unlikely you will see any fiber to the home projects in the near future. As a side note there are stimulus dollars in the Dept of Commerce for broadband projects. Hawaii submitted a $35M proposal to connect fiber to the schools and libraries to enable gigabit speeds.
The delay in implementing an NGTV solution hasn’t stopped video over the Internet. Services like Hulu.com are near the quality of what you get on your television set. I am quite amazed at how crisp the full screen versions of TV shows are on the computer monitor. If you want user generated content, there are sites like YouTube, Ustream and Blip.tv just to name a few. I don’t expect NGTV to be offering much in the way of user generated content but even in the commercial realm, with the lack of good television programs available on the myriad cable channels I can only expect more shows I don’t care to watch on NGTV.
Finally, the one thing I’ve learned during these belt-tightening days is to try to do more with less. I can’t imagine paying for an additional subscription service for content I can currently get for free. You might argue that viewing TV content on your computer monitor is different than the living room experience. But that is where Netflix and the Internet ready TV system come in. If someone were smart they would build an iPhone app that controls the TV channel select and the interface for TV content. Suffice it to say, there are cost effective options today that make the expense of NGTV questionable.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Hawaiian Telcom Will Face Serious Issues When Rolling NGTV Service « The Kona Blog // Nov 16, 2009 at 6:51 pm
[...] Telcom’s hopes for profitability hinge a lot on offering NGTV.Next Generation TV (formerly known as IPTV) will require a lot of [...]
2 JC // Nov 17, 2009 at 4:49 pm
50Mbs is a bit of a stretch… More accurately, the goal for the past 3+ years has been 25Mbps in order to deliver multiple HD streams plus internet and voice (e.g., AT&T U-verse deployment using FTTN/VDSL technology). Verizon’s FiOS service is not multicast IPTV/switched digital video streams, it is more similar to the traditional cable company network design except that they use fiber instead of an HFC network to deliver video.
As you correctly noted, video quality has improved dramatically for the streaming services (Netflix, Hulu et al), so even 25Mbps is fast becoming overkill to deliver a reasonable video experience. There is still a noticeable difference in quality and user experience between watching Youtube or Hulu on a 24 inch computer monitor vs. an NFL football game in HD on a 50 inch plasma HDTV… LOL. I don’t disagree with your position – it’s just a question of when does it become a mass market move and when will fiber nodes penetrate so far into the neighborhood that Mbps becomes a moot point, and we start to care about things that impact the user experience – latency, jitter, packet loss, QoS etc…
Unlike much of the mainland, Hawaii has some interesting geographic challenges that make true cable-tv cord cutting problematic. A combination of off-air HDTV and free online streaming content would be the ultimate consumer win (you get your HDTV sports, Dancing With the Stars etc. combined with the truly unique user generated content and streaming VoD movies) – which many people are doing (cord cutting cable tv that is).
Maybe a potential bytemarks cafe topic would be to invite one of the major broadcasters (KITV, KHON, KGMB etc.) to explain why the household reach for their ATSC digital TV signals is so darn weak/lousy, and what are they going to do about it? Or looking into your crystal ball, will network TV go the way of the newspapers? Historically, cable caompanies have not shared revenues with the local network affiliates for rebroadcasting their network shows, how are they going to make money when people are DVRing the commercials and pulling content for free from the internet?…
Aloha!
3 Hawaiian Telcom Has Officially Petitioned The Hawaii PUC Seeking Approval For Their Recent Bankruptcy Reorganization « The Kona Blog // Jan 11, 2010 at 8:26 pm
[...] are relying on rolling out NGTV as their silver bullet to cure all their ills. This would allow them to compete more effectively [...]
4 Oceanic Time Warner’s Monopoly Won’t Change Unless Hawaiian Telcom Makes Significant Improvements « The Kona Blog // Jan 18, 2010 at 7:38 pm
[...] Telcom hopes to offer NGTV over their existing copper loop infrastructure. They’ve pinned their post bankruptcy recovery on offering this service. In addition, they [...]
5 Hawaiian Telcom’s Post Bankruptcy Success Remains Murky « The Kona Blog // Sep 23, 2010 at 7:44 pm
[...] Telcom is pinning their future financial success on rolling out NGTV and offering triple play services (landline, Internet, and television). However, NGTV requires a lot of bandwidth. So, Hawaiian [...]
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