NEW DELHI: The buzzword today is IPTV. Telecom companies like Reliance Infocomm have already expressed their intention to get into the arena. Now it is the turn of Sahara Group to announce its grandiose plans, albeit restricted to the company's own residential complexes at this stage.
 

Speaking at the first session of day two at Convergence India, Sahara India Media and Entertainment VP for engineering and operations R S Chauhan said, "Sahara is building state of the art residential complexes in 217 locations in India. We aim at providing a better lifestyle through our complexes and we are considering IPTV as one of the many premium services we shall offer."

The session on Broadcast technologies/ Digital Entertainment was chaired by Chauhan. The other panelists comprised Harmonic Inc regional sales director Tat Ng, Conax R&D manager B W Nicolaysen, Motorola senior director advanced tech or broadband Dr Ajay Luthra and Irdeto Access business development manager Rahul Nehra.
 
 

Motorola's DR Luthra made a strong case for the latest Mpeg 4 standard, saying that it gave better quality at half the price of Mpeg 2. The standard, he said, would go a long way in reducing bandwidth demands for bandwidth intensive applications such as VOD and NVod.

Irdeto's Nehra spoke about encryption, especially for IPTV. Nehra said that from a consumer's point of view, he wanted the entire universe of content, with no latency while switching channels, to be transparent and have friendly billing mechanisms. Also, consumers could choose from a number of service providers.

Making a strong case for the need for encryption throughout the life cycle of content whether it be real time or time delayed, Nehra quoted the CII - KPMG report saying, "The Indian broadcast industry loses around $ 8 billion a year to piracy."