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Tiscali’s Home Choice for IP TV
By jpenston | August 14, 2006 |
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I will leave the commentary on the technicalities of Tiscali’s purchase of Home Choice to others. What is interesting to me is that the statement that “Tiscali UK’s strategy will also be to enhance its current wholesale DSL product by adding IPTV to the proposition and syndicating this on a ‘white label’ basis.”
The market has been waiting for a genuine wholesale broadband alternative to BT and IP Stream. Bulldog are now positioned as a wholesaler, but they certainly don’t have the first-mover advantage there that they could have had if it wasn’t for their ill-advised retail push to open the gate. Now that Tiscali have a wholesale IP-TV proposition too, where does that leave the venture capitalists at C&W?
Tiscali have sneaked into the wholesale space, aware that wholesale is the only way to deliver a lower costbase to its retail operations. To be fair, they have made inroads into the wholesale market prior this announcement by bringing on the biggest ISP that is not committed to unbundling, PlusNet, already. Now they have what all small ISPs want, a level playing field with the big players…
What is also interesting is that Sky will have a real fight on its hands: a large scale competitor now has IP-TV distribution rights for Sky’s premium TV content and a significant technical advantage delivering this because of the lessons learned building the Home Choice business. Will Tiscali be able to deliver Sky Sports over Broadband, before Murdoch’s men…?
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