BSNL has launched IPTV services in Haryana with Smart Digivision, an HFCL company, starting with 3 cities - Gurgaon, Faridabad and Ambala. The company plans to launch the service in up to 93 cities, and is viewing this as a means to retain its wireline customers. Smart Digivision is yet another IPTV company to set itself a bloated target - of 4 million IPTV subscribers in 3 years, and to this end, they will launch IPTV in 54 cities for which they have franchise agreements, according to a release.
Smart Digivision also provides IPTV services to HFCL Infotel customers. As of November 2008, HFCL had a very small wireline user base of 155,155 users, as compared to BSNL which had a total user base of 29,703,496 subscribers, of which 848,328 wireline customers are from Haryana.
The other key player in the IPTV space is Aksh Optifibre: there’s very little available on what IOL Netcom had done in the past year, and Time Broadband appears to be focusing more on the international market - particularly China. At the India Telecom 2008 conference last month, I was told that most IPTV service providers did pilots with BSNL and MTNL, and some of them have not launched commercial services since; we’re yet to confirm officially this, though.
P.s.: we couldnt locate the Smart Digivision website, so in case you know - do tell. An old PDF on the HFCL subsidiary here.
