Many operators turned up at an IPTV event in Singapore to report their progress on pay-TV rollouts, but the president of Hong Kong Broadband Network came to denounce it as a "trap for telcos".
Ricky Wong, chairman and cofounder of City Telecom, which runs HKBN and its IPTV business, bbTV, told delegates at the IPTV World Forum Asia in Singapore Thursday that he was "forced to do IPTV because I needed a sexy story to tell my investors."
But Wong says he has never been really convinced about the prospects of IPTV as a revenue generator in Hong Kong, refusing even to take the reported success of rival operator PCCW's NOW Broadband TV as a sign of encouragement.
"I don't like the NOW business model. Everyone at these shows likes to point to them as the model to follow. I say to them, if you want a share price like PCCW's, do IPTV," he quipped.
PCCW's share price on the Hang Seng Index rose HK$0.02 Thursday to HK$4.66 (60 US cents).
Wong was also critical of PCCW's HK$1.5 billion deal last year to secure exclusive rights to English Premier League games for three seasons - over twice what Wharf-owned i-Cable paid for the same rights in 2004.
"When that contract is up, the next bidding war will drive up the cost more, so really the only person who wins is the content provider, not the telco," Wong said. "For that kind of money, they could have just made Wharf an offer and bought i-Cable."
Wong also warned that pay-TV in Hong Kong was going to take a greater competitive hit when digital terrestrial TV is launched at the end of this month.
Right now 90% of the TV audience only watches one channel - TVB Jade. With digital TV, we will have eight terrestrial TV channels, and TVB will own four of them. People won't have time to watch cable TV," he says.
Paul Berriman, CTO of PCCW, couldn't be reached at press time to respond directly to Wong's comments, but told telecomasia.net earlier in the conference that NOW Broadband TV had been very successful at halting the net churn from its fixed-line services and generating new revenue streams, to include commission fees from online sales generated from selling everything from movie tickets and DVDs to takeout food and real-time stock quotes.
Wong didn't give details on how HKBN's IPTV service is faring, except to say that while ARPU for the broadband service rose 70% in the last 12 months, the bbTV service is operating at a loss.
This isn't the first time Wong has rubbished IPTV in public - he made similar comments at the same event last year in Shanghai. Wong told telecomasia.net that he's not anti-IPTV if it offers a truly original service - such as HKBN's bbBox, which allows users to access other PCs via the set-top box to share content.
"I just want to shake some heads and get people to look at IPTV from a different point of view," he says.
But it's a view that others may be starting to share.