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The Scenario Today: Portugal's TV Cabo became the first cable company in the world to deploy advanced set-top boxes running Microsoft TV software. TV Cabo, which has almost 1 million subscribers, will market set-top boxes with a broadband modem providing online shopping, home banking, games, digital video recording, Internet access and e-mail through TV sets.
However, to say that the iTV experiment has been a runaway success is not entirely true. BskyB has been reporting mounting losses for the third successive year, primarily due to the cost of going digital. Also, Television commerce (or T-Commerce) has not really taken off with only 10% of BskyB subscribers actually making a purchase using the medium.
The Indian Context: In India, the advent of Interactive TV looks to be a few years away. The principal causes for this delayed rollout will be the expenses incurred in the digitization of the carrier (which will be cable in our case) and the uncertain consumer demand for such services given the relatively expensive CPE. However, there is no gainsaying the fact that major players have to be ready to exploit a particular part of the iTV value chain as and when this entertainment revolution arrives in India.
Concluded.
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