Info View, a company offering video conferencing and virtual meeting services, wants to offer Internet Protocol (IP) streaming TV in South Africa.
Such a service uses a lot of data and needs a high-speed Internet connection that doesn’t de-prioritise streaming video.
For this reason, Info View also plans to offer affordable uncapped, unshaped ADSL accounts, Co-CEO of Info View, Craig Ruurds, recently told MyBroadband.
They want to offer 4Mbps and 10Mbps uncapped, unshaped accounts, Ruurds said, and aim to price these from R550 per month. This would exclude the monthly line rentals payable to Telkom.
Ruurds said that the IP TV service won’t be limited to their own ADSL accounts, but added that they just haven’t seen an uncapped, unshaped package at the right price.
Info View has 10 users beta-testing its service with over 180 channels, Ruurds said, with no issues being reported so far.
IP TV pricing and offering
They are looking at pricing their smallest IP TV package at R99 per month, Ruurds said. This would include 70 full HD channels, with 52 channels from the UK, and a mix of channels from the rest of Europe (including Germany and France).
Info View is not generating any TV signals in South Africa, Ruurds said. Instead, they have affiliate reseller packages that let them stream content through the device they have developed.
This device is a set-top box that subscribers will need to connect to the streaming service, Ruurds explained. A 4Mbps ADSL connection will support a single HD-capable box or 2 SD-capable boxes.
Subscribers will log into a website where they will be able to register for the channel package they want, Ruurds explained. Users then enter their credentials into the box to access their subscription.
These boxes don’t have a recording facility like DStv’s PVR decoders, but Ruurds said that they are looking into addressing that shortcoming.
History and future
While they have been working on this IP TV service for two years, Ruurds said that Info View has been around since 2008, when it began by offering on-set streaming to the film industry.
With most of the agreements in place and beta testing going ahead, Ruurds said that they are going to try to launch by January 2013.
However, there is still a lot of work to do, Ruurds said.
One of the things Info View is waiting for is ICASA certification on its boxes.
ICASA was approached for comment on Info View and the regulation of IP TV in general, but did not respond by the time of publication.
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