Langkawi: Malaysia's largest telecommunications equipment, solutions and services provider, Ericsson (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, is confident of rolling out the first Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) technology in this country by next year.Its business unit multimedia marketing manager, Sebastian Barros, said the company was currently in discussions with all the major operators in Malaysia.
He, however, declined to elaborate.
IPTV is a system where a digital television service is delivered using Internet Protocol over a network infrastructure, which means the contents are being delivered through technologies used for computer networks, instead of the traditional broadcast and cable formats.
"The major telco operators are renovating their networks in order to build bigger capacity of their bandwidths. On top of that, they have expressed interest to have IPTV ... to monitised the huge investment in instructure side.
"We really think IPTV will happen, probably next year. This obviously will depend on the operators, but as soon as there is a right bandwidth for launching IPTV, operators will move towards that direction," he told Bernama at the Ericsson Malaysia Media Summit here Sunday.
Barros said IPTV was attractive because if offered customers more personalised and interactive TV services, where they could watch the channel or content that they wanted at any time.
Although IPTV is not available yet in Malaysia, over 180 operators worldwide are now commercially using Ericsson's IPTV technologies.
Ericsson's IPTV offering includes broadcast TV, timeshift TV, online gaming, personal video recording, video on demand, electronic programme guide and interactive advertising.
Barros said the company aimed to add an 'enriched' package soon which would include active address book, instant messaging and broadcast reminder via SMS, among others. - Bernama
