Thursday, December 20, 2007

UT continues IPTV momentum with win in Taiwan. BSNL in India next?

One day after closing at the all-time low share price, UT unveiled the Asian iptv customer that they discussed during the last cc. The deployment in Taiwan is as follows:

"The Markwell contract includes system capacity for 500,000 RollingStream IPTV subscribers and 20,000 set-top boxes initially. Markwell plans to deploy an additional 480,000 RollingStream set-top boxes over the next two years."

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/071220/aqth130.html?.v=25

Based on previous discussions on pricing, this contract may yield $20-30m for the intial system setup (hardware+software) and another $3m for the first 20k STB. Maintenance and other revenues for the STB will come later. It normally takes them 3 to 6 months to recognize revenue so it will probably be in Q3 2008.

The deployment in Brazil was for an initial 10k subscribers and system capacity of 50k more so this Taiwan deployment is much larger.

Another PR this week was the official launched of BSNL's multiplay broadband Internet services in India. This was positive because (1) it showed there was no major glitches in this large scale deployment which UT spearheaded, (2) the company can recognize broadband revenue, and (3) can anticipate more expansion contracts in broadband and iptv.

A fellow shareholder (Nawar) posted this on BSNLs launch of iptv on Jan 1, 2008

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1071219/asp/calcutta/story_8670469.asp

After the first IPTV win in India from MTNL early this year, UT had mentioned expecting two more wins in India which turned out to be Bharti and now probably BSNL. Reliance in India is working with Microsoft/Alcatel for their iptv but it would seem that it should cost much more with the half a billion contract with Microsoft alone. I am not sure how Reliance can recoup their costs on that venture.

After iptv deployments in Japan, China, India, Brazil, Taiwan, other possible areas could be Chile, Philippines, Pakistan, Korea, and Mexico? Previous articles mentioned trials in 40+ other areas. Also, if more licenses are issued in China or some "city" starts deployment, then the iptv revenue numbers will start to become significant.