Cube boxes in Hong Kong...........................................
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Anthony Plewes, Hong Kong
HK Telecom Launches Interactive TV
Hongkong Telecom IMS Ltd of Hong Kong launched its interactive television (TV) service, dubbed iTV, in January 1998. The service is "a transformation of the TV concept," according to Michelle Li, manager, media communications at the company. "It transforms the multipoint broadcasting concept to a point-to-point service," she explained.
According to Hongkong Telecom IMS, iTV is the first commercially available broadband interactive multimedia service available in the world.
The iTV service essentially consists of three main services: video-on-demand (VOD), music-on-demand (MOD) and home shopping, which will be based around a virtual mall concept. There are also plans to extend these initial services to also include network gaming, home banking and broadband Internet access.
The home banking service is slated for an April 1998 launch and Hongkong Telecom IMS has an agreement with two major banks in Hong Kong. The service will allow the users to do their banking over the network as well as make deposits and withdrawals at home using an electronic cash based smart card. The smart card can be used directly with the set-top box (see Fig) supplied with the iTV service.
The rental of the set-top box is included in the subscription to the service, which will be around HK$150-200. The set-top box is manufactured by NEC Corp of Japan and includes the functionality for the demodulation and decoding of the MPEG-2 video stream. It also has functionality to prevent taping of the video stream to prevent piracy.
The movies for the VOD service are all digitized in-house in Hongkong Telecom IMS's Digital Media Centre (DMC). The movies are compressed using the firm's proprietary technique, which includes the use of a human technician to optimize the process - this would involve using a less high compression ratio for sequences involving a lot of movement, for example. The average compression ratio for a whole movie is about 1:90.
The DMC is primarily a fully-digitized post-production center, but it also is involved in dubbing and some production. It is the first center of its kind in Hong Kong, and the company invested some HK$120 million in it. Previously it was necessary to send movies to the US for digitization at considerable expense.
The iTV service is delivered to the home using Hong Kong Telecom's existing digital telephone network. The service will utilize fibre to the building (FTTB) technology to get the MPEG-2 video stream from video servers located in three points in the territory directly into the home. An optical network unit (ONU) receives the stream from the ATM network and passes the signal along the ordinary copper wire to the set-top box in the home.
The company has invested over HK$1 billion in the project and has a target of 88,000 households by the end of 1998 and 300,000 households within 2-3 years. |
