IPtv and a Developing Country

Living in a developing country, in a time when you can almost exactly know how each and everyday element in your life differs from other, more developed countries, can be sometimes frustrating. Missing something is one thing, but knowing that you are missing it is daunting. Watching how the technology is evolving in the rest of the world, but never actually participating in this, or touching that, never stops to be crippling and underwhelming. However, sometimes things happen out of the ordinary that give you hope that everything else will follow.

Egypt has for the past few years heavily developed its telecommunications infrastructure to quite an impressive level. Although consumers (or businesses) still cannot get Internet speeds higher than 2 Mbps, it is my belief that the government is actively trying to push the Internet and communications technology as much as it can. Of course, the fact that millions of people do not still have electricity or water in their homes, the fact that most citizens can hardly eat or pay for their medicine, or the fact that there is a probability that I could get arrested for writing this innocent post, still makes it feel like living in a developing country. But today is not a whining day, today is the day where I will try to look into the ups, and shed the downs from my eyes.

TEData, one of the few Internet carriers in Egypt, recently launched the first IPtv service in Egypt in cooperation with ART, the Arab Radio and Television Network. ART produces more than a dozen satellite channels, with programming that ranges from movies, television series, sports to education. Additionally, ART partners with Asia’s STAR to air some of their programming, like the Star Movies and Star World channels.

The basic ART satellite package runs at 30 L.E. (around $5) per month, which includes the 7 channels produced by ART. Their “Super” packages includes 36 channels and would set you back 120 L.E. per month.

TEData, partenering with ART, started offering an IPtv service, called TEvu, that goes along with TEData’s ADSL Internet service. TEvu costs 30 L.E. per month for the basic package, which includes 7 channels: ART Aflam (an Arabic movie channel), ART Movie World (an English movie channel), ART Hekayat (an Arabic tv series channel), Iqraa (a religion-specific channel), CNN International, and finally, ART Sports 1 and ART Sports 2. Another package adds to the previous channels ART Sports 3 and ART Sports 4, and costs 60 L.E. per month.

Subscribers of TEvu can also buy Video on Demand (VoD) credit at units of 30, 60, and 90 L.E., which they can redeem towards watching VoD movies at 5 or 10 L.E. a piece. You can only watch a movie once though!!

Since I already had a 512Kbps ADSL subscription with TEData, I thought I would give it a try! Not that I need it, and not that most in this country actually need it, but just to try and see how they would put a service like this together! The thing is, citizens of this holy land have in a few years meshed an (illegal) network of cables interconnecting almost every home to provide them with (again, illegal) access to both public satellite channels and private satellite networks. Just pay the cable-guy down the street 20 or 30 L.E. per month, and you get dozens of the crème de la crème of satellite channels, all piped through ugly cables flying over the rooftops of the city.

But then again, I wanted to try it out; see what they offer and how they would pull it off. The first that concerned me was how they would fit a streaming video of a decent quality into bandwidth as little as mine. Luckily, they do not. During the 1-week it took them to activate my service (which they said it would be only 48 hours when I signed up), they changed the speed of the link from my home to the central office to 6Mbps, rather than 512Kbps, while keeping my link to the rest of the world throttled at 512Kbps as it was. Of those 6Mbps, 1.5 Mbps would be used for pushing the streaming video from the central office to my sweet home. The beauty of this is that it does not clog my 512Kbps connection, so I can browse the Internet and download files while still watching IPtv channels.

After the one week it took them to activate the service, I was sent an SMS message containing a username and password and was asked to use them to log into the TEvu website. Here is where the fun started. I went to the site, but in no way found anywhere to login, and when I tried to play the streams on the website, I did not get the License.

Acquisition window as usually happens with DRM’ed Windows Media content. I called them, and they had no idea what the heck was going on. It only took me more than a dozen calls to their technical support over a total of one week so that they finally figure out the issue and properly configure my service at the central office!! Frustrating? Hell yeah!!

Yeah, just as you read it, the service is powered by Microsoft’s IPtv platfrom, with all content delivered through Windows Media 9 servers with enough DRM to suffocate all your rights. Furthermore, you will need a router that allows setting multiple Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC), a feature not wildly available in consumer routers. In addition to the PVC normally used to connect to the Internet, you need to add two additional PVC bridges to the central office. Their technical support can guide you through the phone on how to configure the router, but they only support 3Com’s OfficeConnect, which I had to rent from them for 30 L.E. per month. Damn more expenses.

To my misfortune, I wanted to try the service on Windows Vista, in hopes of running it on Vista’s Media Center. Sadly, the License Acquisition did not work on Windows Media Player (WMP) 11, although their technical support representative reiterated for me on phone that it should work on “WMP 10 or higher”. And since TEData allows for only one license to be acquired (to prevent several computers from running the service simultaneously), I knew I had to ask them to revoke my license so I can acquire a new one. “Not a biggie,” I told him, and asked him to reset my license so that I could run the service on an XP machine with WMP 10. To my surprise, he exclaimed, “reset the license?”, and told me that such “resetting” cannot be done!!

All that they knew was that I could “Backup” my licenses from WMP and “Restore” them on the machine I would like to run the service on. However, what they did not know is that in WMP 11, Microsoft removed the feature to backup and restore licenses, leaving this in the hands of the service provider! The service provider, which in this case is supposed to be them. But what the heck, who keeps track of responsibilities!?

Again, I asked him to reset my license, but he insisted that “this cannot be done.” Without much ranting, let me just say that it only took them 4 days to figure out how to reset my license. Frustrating? Hell yeah!!

Finally, and after close to three weeks from signing up, I got the service up and running. Ironically, I was configuring it on my Dell laptop, in which I usually watch 1080p (1920×1080) and 720p (1280×720) videos on its 17″ widescreen. At a bitrate of “1510 Kb/s”, I was expecting kick-ass DVD-quality video at a 640×480 resolution or so, since I knew ART broadcasted in DVB. But rather, I was treated with a low quality 384×288 stream that brought back the memories of watching CAM movies in the late 90’s! But then at least I witnessed no frame drops or compression artifacts.

In general, I was utterly frustrated with every bit of the experience of trying to use, and using, TEvu. The activation process took much longer than promised, their technical support is technically impaired, and the selection of channels is very weak. But Perhaps the latter was the most annoying aspect, and is the reason why I would not renew the IPtv subscription for the next month.

Although I cannot recommend TEvu to anyone, and despite all the inconveniences I faced in the way, I am still looking forward to what possibilities this could lead to. The fact that TEData was ready to embark in such endeavor, and the fact they managed to convince a large media company to join, is alone worthy of appreciation.

Practically speaking, I do not think that this is the time for mass IPtv adoption just yet, and I believe that both TEData and ART very well realize that. I suspect this may only be a technical experiment - they just wanted to see how things would work out. To gain momentum, and to appeal to consumers, the service would have to compete with an illegitimate infrastructure that delivers all the channels everyone would ever need at a very steep price!

I give them a perfect score for trying, but past that, they fail in most.

Posted December 18th, 2006. Filed under: Posts.