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Carrier Services
UTStarcom-China Netcom in IPTV Deal
Deployment Covers Northeast China Cities
by Jim Barthold
China Netcom will deploy end-to-end IPTV in Northeast China
using UTStarcom’s RollingStream technology, the two
companies said.
The contract extends a commercial trial that was launched last
May with an initial deployment of 100,000 concurrent media
streams covering the major metropolitan areas of Harbin in
the Heilongjiang province. That service has to date
accumulated 53,000 subscribers who get live broadcast TV
with time shifting capabilities, 48-hour TV-on-demand and
about 5,600 hours of video-on-demand, among other
features.
“It’s one of many deals that are going on in China right now,”
said Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst at
broadbandtrends.com. “Like everything else, there’s a wide
consumption of television and entertainment in the Chinese
market.”
Chinese operators, she said, mirror their counterparts
throughout the world by wanting to add more value to their
existing broadband services and using IPTV as the hook.
UTStarcom, she said, has been working hard to foster
relationships with Chinese operators “and I think they really
put a lot of emphasis on IPTV opportunities within the China
market.”
The most telling point of the announcement, she said, is the
size of the Chinese market compared to the rest of the world.
“You hear an operator here (in the U.S.) saying they have an
IPTV trial going on with 1500 (users) and they (Chinese) have
a trial going on with 150,000,” she said.
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