More on Cable and Wireless from the Financial Times.
CWC: Cable group strikes interactive deals
By Cathy Newman
Cable and Wireless
Communications, the UK's biggest cable group, will
today announce it is setting up its own interactive
television service, stealing a march on British Interactive
Broadcasting, the venture part-owned by British
Telecommunications and British Sky Broadcasting.
CWC will reveal it has signed deals with a number of
companies, including Barclays Bank and British
Airways, to offer subscribers home shopping, banking
and other interactive television channels. CWC's
interactive "TV Mall" will be offered as part of its
200-channel digital service to be launched next year.
The news will come as a blow to BIB, which last week
lost its second chief executive in a year. BIB, which has
yet to announce any deals with retailers, is owned by
BT, British Sky Broadcasting, Midland Bank and
Matsushita Electric.
Other companies that have signed letters of intent with
CWC include the joint venture between Littlewoods
Home Shopping Group and Granada Media Group. ITN,
and Associated News Media, a subsidiary of Daily Mail
and General Trust, are to provide inter-active news and
information.
Peter Howard, director of programming and content at
CWC, said the company had talked about using BIB's
product instead of developing its own. However, he
added: "In the absence of any concrete business from
BIB, we want to get on and launch something."
Mr Howard said retailers had been attracted to CWC's
planned service because the company had decided to
adopt internet-based operating systems.
BIB, which will provide home shopping services for
BSkyB's 140-channel digital service, had originally
planned to use a technology platform incompatible with
internet-based operating systems. That would have
made it more difficult for retailers to adapt their internet
applications to run on BIB's service.
CWC, which has 800,000 analogue subscribers, may
offer its service to other cable companies and On Digital,
the terrestrial pay-TV group.
And from the C&W website
cwcom.co.uk (click on Digital TV)
"We have been working with one of the market leaders, General Instrument, as
our turnkey supplier for a year now to design and build our highly sophisticated
digital headends.
Our extensive use of fibre means that our cable network is already capable of
carrying broadband signals, so the only real changes which have to be made to
provide digital services are at our headends."
Of Course C&W is the largest shareholder of Hong Kong Telecom which has thier IMS service. Settop boxes?
c-cube.com
Tim |
