Huawei will put a new IPTV Set-Top Box chipset in commercial use towards the end of this year. The chipset is supposed to bring down the cost of IPTV STBs to an affordable level. In its second design iteration, the new solution will also cater for HD. The average cost of an IP STB in China right now is slightly less than $100. Outside China, the cost shoots upwards of $170 to $190.
IP STB forms the biggest cost component from deployment perspective and reduction in cost is certainly welcome as far as the operators and end users are concerned. Huawei will limit the usage of this new STB solely within its IPTV partners in opportunities where Huawei is the prime stakeholder.
Huawei has 15 IPTV deployments worldwide. 7 of them are in China. China Telecom, its biggest customer, experienced a significant increase in new subscribers during the recent Olympic Games. The service provider had introduced HD, games specific time shifting, and other fancy things during Olympics.
According to Huawei, it has so far shipped capacity for around 5 million IPTV subs. The vendor is not certain how many live subs are hosted off its platform. But as an indication of that, it has shipped over 500,000 IP STBs so far.
Although a late comer in the IPTV market, Huawei is playing the catch-up quite well. It is one of the leading IPTV vendors in China. In terms of the product capabilities, Huawei is one of very few vendors that has a working platform for convergent IPTV services. Its convergent platform – that enables IPTV, mobile TV, and Communicating TV on the same platform – is undergoing trials at Guangdong Telecom. The platform is also able to integrate features such as video calling and chatting over TV. And there is always that low cost IP STB to count on once the chipset is introduced later this year.