Airtel DTH aims to ride high on Infy services
Telecom services major Bharti Airtel has entered into an innovation and technology partnership with Infosys Technologies to deliver Airtel digital TV, its DTH television service to its customers.
Accordingly, Infy’s Digital Convergence Platform will ensure that Infosys would provide a suite of products including devices, application servers and interactive applications to Airtel digital TV customers. Airtel’s digital TV technology in combination with Infosys’ Digital Convergence Platform will bring digital lifestyle applications offering interactivity and personalization into the living room, it is expected. Bharti Airtel , which has a total of around 80 million customers, plans to make its entry into the DTH space with highly innovative features and offerings. The agreement with Infosys may be seen as keeping in line with the importance the company has accorded to the DTH foray.
The features would include interactive and non-intrusive applications like widgets that can be invoked by the user to view relevant and customized information. In a first of its kind initiative, TV viewers will also be given the option of accessing local city information through interactive applications such as iCity, internet-like experiences on televisions with iNet, live and personalized stock quotes, breaking news, horoscopes, cricket scores and shopping deals in the city without interrupting the TV-viewing experience. Bharti Airtel has said that Airtel digital TV customers will also have select websites packaged suitably for TV-viewing, in an application called tPortal. In addition, a host of other innovative applications are slated for release over a period of time, it added.
Infosys has said that the technology platform that powers Airtel digital TV brings the potential that computers offer to television sets. In addition to entertainment, it would be also possible to experience interactive information services and engage in transactions using regular TVs. This technology also makes it possible to have a converged consumer experience across devices like televisions, computers, smart mobile phones and digital music players.