Korean Company Plans World’s Largest ITV Service

(Telephony) Korean ISP It’s TV is building what it calls the world’s largest interactive TV service using MPEG over IP to deliver 10 Mb/s of data per household to multi-dwelling units in Seoul.

It’s TV is using nCUBE and Orca Interactive to supply equipment and integrate the end-to-end interactive TV system, Lucent for encoders and is building its own set-top boxes.

Two key factors encouraged the development of the service, said Jin-Wook Kim, It’s TV’s chief executive.

“Seoul, Korea, has the leading broadband infrastructure in the world,” he said. “The demographics and the way the city is laid out, encourages a lot of multi-dwelling units, so it’s just very efficient to deliver this kind of service.”

It’s TV is using IP rather than conventional cable to avoid the hassle of getting a cable TV license. It’s running fiber to the curb of the MDUs and delivering the bandwidth via in-building ADSL networks which exist in “about 95% of all apartments in Korea,” said Kim.

The service provider will supply a set-top box and is building its own proprietary model that is “actually better than any of the set-top boxes that are currently available in the U.S.,” Kim boasted.

The rollout will expand to 88,000 homes in 2001, 334,000 in 2002, and 460,000 in 2003. It’s a bonanza for U.S.-based nCUBE, which is providing 96 servers to do the VOD at a value of nearly $3 million, and for Israeli-based Orca, an independently managed subsidiary of Emblaze Systems, which is supplying encoders, streaming media services and “on-demand” software applications to serve video and interactive TV services.

“One of the special features we have [to] offer in Korea is that our system is multichannel. It was built to support not only TV, but PC and wireless also,” said Haggai Barel, Orca’s CEO.

That could eventually fit into It’s TV’s plans, said Kim.

“While we can deliver 10 megabits to each individual set-top box, we only have to dedicate about 4 megabits to VOD and have 6 megs left over for high-speed Internet and, ultimately, telephony, when we get into that,” he said.