Michiel van Diesen said at May 20th, 2007 at 8:32am

Premiere (Germany) recently introduced this system as well. I guess they use some spare capacity on transponders, especially when certain stations are off-air. I thought Top-Up TV (FreeView) uses the same system with some free slots on DVB-T multiplexes.

Although clever, this system still can’t beat IP-TV. Take a look at Tele2 for example, which used the Dutch soccer rights to introduce an IP-TV system in The Netherlands. They’ve got full video on demand with virtually all in-house produced programs from the public service broadcasters (Nederland 1, 2 and 3) as well as Tien (Talpa, John de Mol). See www.tele2.tv for more info about the other content in their video library.

I’m very anxious to see what happens if VDSL(2) gets introduced in The Netherlands. KPN (PSTN-operator) announced their investing a whopping two billion to upgrade their network to fiber-to-the-street, theoretically allowing 100Mbit/s (full-duplex) in the overwhelming majority of Dutch households. That would allow multiple HD-TV streams per household and still leave enough capacity for browsing, downloading and VoIP.

If they get it working (the current IP-TV product ‘Mine’ has some issues and they’ve got some network issues with respect to the backbone), it could give the cable operators a run for their money. Not to mention the fact that our telecom regulator (Opta) has very tight regulations in place, forcing KPN to open up their network for third parties. This already allowed a fierce competition between KPN, Tele2, Orange and BBNed (all with own fiber networks, i.e. backbones) and the cable operators. The result: Dutch consumers can get a wide-open ADSL2+ connection - without any data limits, just a Fair Use Policy (which is VERY generous) - for

Michiel van Diesen said at May 20th, 2007 at 8:35am

[whoops, former comment was slightly too long, the rest:]

for

Michiel van Diesen said at May 20th, 2007 at 8:37am

Allright, third attempt (problem found):

for EUR 24 a month. So, friendly advise to all Britons: pressure the regulators in the UK to stimulate competition. It’s fun, believe me.

(James, my apologies for the mess above. The comment system refuses to accept some input - as it turns out, some signs used in HTML-tags).

Ash said at May 20th, 2007 at 9:24pm

Sounds more like Top Up TV Anytime than the Virgin offering in the way it works.

James Cridland said at May 20th, 2007 at 9:54pm

(Michiel - perhaps this website is run by the UKIP party, if it doesn’t like Euro signs!)