Telecom eyes Optus venture
Hongkong Telecom Interactive Multimedia Services (IMS) has rejected criticism of a lack of interest in video on demand (VOD) projects and says it may set up a system in Australia with Optus.
'They are quite interested in duplicating our system,' IMS managing director William Lo said of Optus, a sister company of Hongkong Telecom and the first private telecoms provider in Australia.
'This is not expected to happen before two years though,' he said.
He confirmed that the IMS video-on-demand project was progressing well, and was on schedule for a soft launch in July and to be fully operational in October.
'We are sticking to the plans we announced a year ago,' he said.
IMS will be the first in the world to launch these commercial interactive multimedia services, making Hong Kong a showcase for such advanced technology.
Mr Lo said a number of countries had come to Hong Kong to get some understanding and leverage from the system, including Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan.
'The level of Hong Kong's involvement will depend on the infrastructure of the country,' he said, adding that Singapore was at least 18 months behind the territory.
Similar projects worldwide were getting off the ground and would be launched soon after Hong Kong, he said.
Mr Lo's statement contradicts a previous statement by Wong Mang-hung, acting assistant director of the Office of the Telecommunications Authority (Ofta), who said last week that 'there seems to be a loss of interest in VOD recently'.
Talking at the Business and Technology Exchange Forum, Mr Wong said that British Telecom had decided to put on hold its VOD project 'as evidence mounts that customer interest is dim'.
In 1995, Hongkong Telecom estimated that there could be 250,000 subscribers within the first two years.
'It is difficult to tell whether this estimate still holds as technology is changing very fast which may affect commercial viability,' Mr Wong said.
Mr Lo said Mr Wong's bleak picture was overly pessimistic. 'Recently, telecommunications around the world have kind of re-planned their video-on-demand projects but are in no way stopping them.' Last October, one key initiator, Bell Atlantic, announced the start of the commercial transition phase of its video-on-demand product and indicated that the goal was to start commercial deployment in 1998.
Bell Atlantic Video Services' Stargazer project had to be withdrawn from technical field tests because it was originally based on 1993 vintage technologies - such as set-tops and copper wires enhanced for video transmission - that have since been surpassed by the fast pace of technical change.
In Hong Kong, IMS' video-on-demand service will initially be offered to about 30,000 home subscribers, which is the number of set-top boxes Hongkong Telecom has ordered from NEC.
'Our price contract implies that we will order more,' Mr Lo said.
According to a source in the United States, NEC's set-top box would use a video decoding chip developed by US-based digital video company C-Cube Microsystems.
'The individual components that come into our set-top box are up to NEC,' Mr Lo said. NEC had been given a set of technology requirements, he said.
