Shanghai to Fully Start IPTV Service This September

C114 network reported the following on the upcoming IPTV roll out in Shanghai. Though this is not news to me, but I am still pleased to read about the promotion campaign that C/T and SMG will start doing.

Both SMG and China Telecom have made full use of market resources to promote IPTV service. TV advertising will be widely broadcast on August 28. By then, various TV media, radio media and flat media under SMG will promote the service during prime time. Apart from that, large amount of investment will be put in newspaper advertising and subway advertising. Shanghai Telecom, the local unit of China Telecom, will let more and more Shanghai users get to know IPTV by taking advantage of outdoor advertising, telecom bills as well as Internet resources.

Shanghai Telecom hopes that the promotion will cover at least 3 million broadband users within one month. At the same time, Shanghai Telecom plans to establish tens of experience centers for IPTV service. Shanghai Telecom has designed a network capacity for 100,000 users at present. UTStarcom and ZTE will take over the project. It is expected there will be 70,000 IPTV users by the end of this year.

On the other hand, it's been reported that Shanghai's IPTV test runs several month's ago encountered many unexpected problems such as user's unwillingness to add a cable in their living/bed rooms, because doing so would damage the floor/walls in their newly decorated apartments. Actually that's exactly what I had to deal with in Shenzhen when I wanted to switch my Internet service from cable to DSL several months ago. I ended up giving up the idea.