Well, mobile appears to be the way to go in India. Time Broadband and Stanton Technologies, which had recently announced a joint venture, have entered the Chinese market with a deal with Potevio, a Chinese Government owned entity, the company announced at Convergence India on Thursday. The Potevio deal gives the JV access to China Mobile and China Unicom, which have around 500 million mobile subscribers (apparently, direct deals with operators are not permitted in China). Time Broadband will provide the content: they’ve signed an MoU with the Indian Music Industry to be the License Content Provider for IPTV on various platforms.

But what is IPTV on Mobile? On the basis of my discussion with Time Broadband execs, it appeared to be similar to TV over Mobile networks, with added interactivity. What’s important to note is that IPTV on Mobile works over the 2.5G network - hence can be deployed in India as well, which they claim is due to Stanton’s proprietary compression technology. Mervin Nevis, CEO of Stanton Technologies said that the service requires a bit-rate of 55kbps, which is feasible in India, though I think consistency of GPRS connections is an issue.

The JV is targeting South East Asia and Ukraine; How much investment will be required? Tushar Shah, CFO of Time Broadband told Contentsutra they they would require around $5 million per contract...and to cover all the operators in India, they’ll need an investment of $20-25 million. Dubai Ventures had picked up 40 percent stake in Time Broadband last year.

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