Amit Kumar Dev, Co-founder, Director (Operations)& CTO, TIME Broadband Services Private Limited, has been quite proactive in the IPTV space for the last three years and has been working closely with many telecom operators including BSNL to help telecos roll out their IPTV services. 

In an interaction with Idhries Ahmad , Dev talks about the myriad of services that IPTV has to offer and how that will enhance the users experience of watching Television.

Dev also share information on how BSNL and other operators plan to hook consumers to IPTV world. 

CIOL:  Times Broadband has been really active in the IPTV space in India. Can you tell us what exactly is the role of Times Broadband in the roll out of IPTV services in the country?

Content is the known business of the broadcasters while as the connectivity is known business of the telecom operators.

Telecom companies are not be able to understand the full scope and concerns of a converged service as much as a broadcast company is not able to understand the technology of the delivery. This is a field, which is quite equidistant to both the fancied expert domains of telecom and broadcast.

We are a facilitator in-between ensuring two-way flow of content over the two-way system to make a new business happen between two fixed points of business that is telecom and broadcast.

We are following a global model. Wherever a telecom operator has gone for IPTV, they are either caught in the hands of some smart footed vendors or they have got into little bit of tangle with the content providers.

CIOL: So you essentially work as a sort of meet point between the content and the connectivity through a model platform of delivery that is IPTV?

Dev: Yes, We can only roll out the IPTV service when the telecom (connectivity) and the broadcast (content) are ready to roll out the converged services. If they are not ready we are cant do anything because we are only doing the overlay service i.e. putting content over the infrastructure.

That is the core of business. We have been working with many telecom operators for the last three years for rolling out IPTV services.

IPTV is a two-way service. Fully interactive and fully convergent service. So IPTV has not only to work in the forward direction but also in the reverse direction and that is what we do.

CIOL: And who are the operators that you are working with and how is the way you are going about the rollout.

We are talking in advance stage with BSNL to roll out their service in two metros. We first understand what were the problems they faced when they rolled out their high-speed data.