IP Democracy: AT&T IPTV Rollout Begins in San Antonio

The Wall Street Journal’s Dionne Searcey reports that AT&T has begun offering IPTV service to several hundred customers in San Antonio.

Initially, the service will look much like regular cable TV, with a few new features. Customers will be able to view one channel while flipping through others in a “picture within a picture” format, and channel surfing will be much faster than with regular cable TV, company officials said.

For now, AT&T will offer 200 channels, though it expects to offer 1,000 or more channels when it expands the service to other markets in about six months…Several hundred video-on-demand movies are being offered…AT&T’s initial TV service lacks features such as high-definition channels, which are commonly offered by cable companies. The company won’t reveal the price of its service but said it was competitive with other cable-TV offerings in the area.

Searcey says “[c]ustomers will receive three set-top boxes with built-in digital video recorders.” That’s a pretty significant investment in CPE.

Phil Harvey at Lightreading provides some additional details:

The carrier’s first IPTV customers will have their homes outfitted with a 2Wire Inc. residential gateway on the outside of the home and up to three DVR-equipped set-top boxes on the inside. AT&T will use Motorola…and Scientific-Atlanta…set-tops later on. It is using Tatung products right now. As the service ramps, says [AT&T spokeswoman Denise Koenig], customers will get several dozen more channels and the ability to enjoy “whole-house DVR” — a service where a program recorded by one TV is watchable on any other TV in the house.

Interestingly, AT&T still hasn’t settled on a single compression scheme to get all its video bits down the last few feet of copper pair to the customer’s house. This initial market entry in San Antonio uses “either MPEG-4 or VC-1,” according to Koenig. VC-1 is Microsoft’s Windows Media 9 Series codec for creating high-quality video at lower data rates.

According to Searcey:

Company officials say users of AT&T’s Internet television eventually will be able to program their digital video recorders with cellphones and will be able to choose among various camera angles while watching sports events. AT&T also wants to let consumers watch on a cellphone shows stored on a home digital video recorder.

Om Malik cites a research note by UBS analyst John Hodulik:

We do not expect, AT&T to offer HD over its IPTV platform until 2007 due to bandwidth and compression limitations. We believe that questions remain over the scalability of the IPTV platform and currently expect AT&T to end 2006 with roughly 95K video subscribers, which represents 1% of expected fiber qualified homes.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on January 5, 2006 11:45 PM to IP Democracy