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Technology Stocks : PCW - Pacific Century CyberWorks Limited -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (1651)	7/18/2001 3:29:07 PM
From: ms.smartest.person	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2248

Taking on the video stores 2001-07-18 SINGAPORE-BASED Intertainer Asia says it is in discussions with both Pacific Century CyberWorks (0008) and i-Cable (1097) to provide broadband entertainment-on-demand in the SAR, says chief operating officer Steve Smith. Mr Smith and executive vice-chairman Andrew Yap also denied rumours that Intertainer has struck a deal with PCCW to provide Hollywood content for the troubled telecom's iTV unit. The impending entry of Intertainer in two months has caused heated debate on market acceptance of their services. Intertainer claims it will liberate viewers by providing, via streaming video, a wide variety of local and international entertainment - movies, music videos, TV shows, concerts, games, among other choices - 24 hours a day via PC and, if the appropriate set-top boxes are deployed, through television. It says to be profitable, it will need 20,000 to 30,000 customers ordering two movies a month at around $25, the amount video rental Movieland charges a night for a newly released DVD. The entertainment-on- demand firm has secured agreements with studios and networks such as 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, Sony, Dreamworks, National Geographic, the BBC and ESPN to offer content. There are no monthly subscription fees. Intertainer is owned by US-based Intertainer, YTC Corporation, Coote/Hayes Production and Macquarie Bank. Intertainer USA, which has a 30 per cent stake in Intertainer Asia, is backed by a strong group of investors including Intel, Sony and Microsoft. I-Cable vice-president for external affairs Garmen Chan says the potential impact of Intertainer would be felt more by iTV. ''We have been competing with them for the past three years and it has not affected our business at all. You also have to wonder what would be the demand for movies on the PC when pirated Pearl Harbor and The Mummy Returns VCDs and DVDs are readily available at low prices.'' I-Cable's experiment with pay- per-view has not been encouraging. On the technical side, OpenTV managing director Jeffery Brown questions the ADSL network that Intertainer uses. ''They are streaming digital video over a limited bandwidth medium - 640 Kbps (kilobytes per second) - to a PC. They are suggesting that people are going to sit in front of their PCs and watch a movie at video quality a fraction as good as broadcast quality, which is between 4 Mbps and 6 Mbps.'' TVB Galaxy managing director Stanley Tang is also doubtful about the ADSL aspect. ''To deliver to TV, they need HFC fibre-optics which are not available in Hong Kong, except those wired by iCable. But I don't think i-Cable will let Intertainer use their wires.'' Vickers Ballas TV analyst Tommy Ho says: ''It appears there is very little localised content, which is the key to viewership. The most watched programming among i-Cable's offerings is Cantonese content, capturing 90 per cent of the total viewership.'' Mr Yap's response is HFC is old technology. ''You don't need HFC to go to television. You can use telephone lines now. You can use broadband DSL. There are DSL set-top boxes now available in the market.'' The reason for using ADSL has to do with set-top box systems in Asia, which are still in the process of converting from analogue to digital. Intertainer cannot force whoever they partner with to provide DSL STBs, but ''we are a driver for it'', says Mr Yap. In the meantime, Intertainer is now doing MPEG-4 compression, he adds. ''We are able to deliver movies at a stable bandwidth of 1.5 or even down to as slow as 750 Kbps,'' says Mr Yap. Both parties package what is called an entertainer world which includes music, games and videos, and share revenues. Mr Yap says: ''We are not competitors, we are partners.'' Terms and Conditions Copyright© 2000 LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights Reserved. quamnet.com