MTN SA says it will launch a video-on-demand (VOD) service in November, partnering with Discover Digital, a South African digital entertainment business.<\/p>\n
Larry Annetts, chief marketing officer (CMO) told BusinessTech on a conference call on Thursday (23 October) that MTN has piloted the service offline, and “is looking to launch at the end of November”.<\/p>\n
Annetts said that the new service would be subscription based and would provide customers with access to “good content”.<\/p>\n
He added that the monthly service would also enable customers to download movies, as a transactional video on demand (T-VOD) play.<\/p>\n
MTN would structure data bundles to download this content at subsidized prices, the marketing lead said.<\/p>\n
Annetts said that MTN would provide pricing details closer to launch.<\/p>\n
In August, MTN moved a step closer to offering a meaningful streaming video service on its network following a successful live trial of a Transport Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and 2.4Tbps wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) system.<\/p>\n
The trial, in conjunction with\u00a0Huawei, was the fastest and most intelligent optical network to date in the industry, MTN said.<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, MTN released its latest fibre-to-the-home broadband prices, with tariffs ranging between R794 per month and R1,389 per month.<\/p>\n
MTN is offering speeds between 20Mbps and 100Mbps, and data packages ranging from 10GB to 500GB per month.<\/p>\n
South Africa has seen the launch of several VOD services in recent months including Altech Node, a subscription \u201cpush\u201d service and home automation system, and Vidi, an online VOD service from Times Media Group.<\/p>\n
Telkom has expressed its interest to offer VOD by extending an invitation to industry to bid for the provisioning of VOD in February, while Vodacom has remained coy about any plans it may have.<\/p>\n
South Africa’s incumbent pay-TV operator, MultiChoice, said earlier this month that if it were to launch a video-on-demand service, it would not see a return on investment for some time.<\/p>\n
The group, however, said that it would look into launching a stand-alone online subscription video streaming service \u2013 but it\u2019s a case of timing.<\/p>\n
No money in video-on-demand yet: Multichoice<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n MTN regains footing in SA<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n MTN a step closer to streaming video<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n