Television stations jump to OTT market

OTT (over the top) has been heating not only telecom groups, but televisions as well. Believing that OTT is an irresistible trend, television service providers have jumped into the market, but none of them has made profit on it. Report by Vietnam Net online newspaper.
OTT (over the top) has been heating not only telecom groups, buttelevisions as well. Believing that OTT is an irresistible trend,television service providers have jumped into the market, but none ofthem has made profit on it. Report by Vietnam Net online newspaper.

At least three big, VTVcab, FPT Telecom and VTC, have begun providing OTT TV service.

VTVcab was the pioneer in this field when it launched VTV Plus, theOTT TV service, in January 2013. This is the product of the cooperationbetween VTVcab and Medianet Corporation.

On the OTTtechnology platform, VTV Plus allows to recognise the devices TVwatchers use to choose appropriate signals and resolution, thus helpingaudience watch TV with the highest quality, no matter where they moveto.

Pham Anh Chien, President of Medianet, said thatVTV Plus’ coverage can reach all the screens run on iOS, Android andWindows Phone, all the screens of phones, tablets, personal computers,laptops or smart TVs.

Users just need to downloadVTV Plus app and connect with Internet to turn all the screens into TVsets. All the TV television channels provided on VTVcab system areavailable on VTV Plus.

FPT Telecom has officiallyprovided FPT Play on Google’s and Apple’s app stores since early October2013. A report showed that FPT Play has been downloaded by 100,000users who have installed it on smart devices.

FPTPlay is providing 85 TV channels, including SD and HD signals, whileintegrating entertainment features (music video clips, TV shows) and thefeature of automatically recognising customers’ type of connection, soas to provide suitable quality.

This allows users towatch TV content with stable quality on different types of connectionsincluding 3G or wifi. It also can automatically inform about the newprograms or contents to users.

Vu Anh Tu, TechnologyDirector of FPT Telecom, said the outstanding features of FPT Play liein stable and high quality transmission and interesting content.

Tu has revealed that FPT Telecom is going to launch the new versionsof FPT Play in the time to come, which allows strengthening theconnection capability between two products. This would help users havebetter interaction with TVs.

VTC has been considering providing services on OTT platform for over one year. It is under the technical trial run.

Televisions provide services not to… make money

VTV Plus began providing services on January 1, 2013, and begancollecting fees on July 1, 2013. To date, it has attracted more than 2.5million user accounts.

However, Chien from Medianetadmitted that the number of viewers paying fees remains very modest,even though VTV Plus offers a flexible payment method, under which userscan pay monthly subscription fee, weekly or daily subscription fee, orpay fee for the contents they watch.

“The growthrate of the number of subscribers has been very satisfactory, but mostof them just want to use services free of charge,” Chien said.

At present, VTV Plus is still in its early development stage when itstop priority task is to obtain as many subscribers as possible.

Chien noted that OTT TV is a kind of service with great potentials,while OTT TV service providers hope they can charge users for originalcontent or interaction TV services.

Tu from FPT Telecom also said FPT Play is still free to all users.-VNA

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