Daily News 2006/05/23

Number of IPTV subscribers in the Asia-pacific region doubled in 2005, and will reach 53,000,000 in 2009

American high-tech market research institute Infonetics released a forecast report on the development of global IPTV market. The report says that by the year 2009 the global IPTV equipment and service market will value as much as 44,000,000,000 USD.
According to Infonetics, by the year 2009, there will be 53,000,000 IPTV subscribers all over the world. To meet the increasing demand on the market, IPTV service providers are now investing more in IPTV infrastructure, transmission network and content industry.
The reports says that in Europe, Mid East and Africa sales income from IPTV services is growing the fastest, while in Asia-pacific region the number of IPTV subscribers is growing the fastest due to mature broadband infrastructure in this region. Some broadband providers have even begun to deploy VDSL2 network. According to the statistics, from 2004 to 2005 the number of IPTV subscribers has doubled.
As for North America, Infonetics forecasts that the number of IPTV subscribers will increase by 4 times from the year 2005 to 2009.
By 2009 the IPTV equipment market will value at 6,000,000,000 USD, and the sales income from the service will exceed 38,000,000,000 USD. In 2005, sales income from IPTV equipment in the world exceeded 400,000,000 USD.

Skype providing real-time translation service for VoIP subscribers

According to CNW.CN, Skype announced on Thursday to cooperate with two companies to provide translation services (over 150 languages) to VoIP users.
This service is based on language services provided by Language Line and IVR-based techniques provided by Voxeo. Usually the users are communicating with each other with English and another language. The languages range from Arabic to Vietnamese
Users can enjoy such service all year round and all day long, paying 2.99 USD a minute.

Beijing Netcom launching fixed telephone SM service, charging 0.3 RMB for one

Before the advent of 5·17 the world telecommunication day, Beijing Netcom announced to expand the capability of fixed telephone with new functions. One of the new functions is SM service.
The caller can record for two minutes at a time, paying 0.3 RMB yuan for one SM. The called person, if using mobile phone, shall pay local telephone fee, or don't need to pay any fee if using fixed telephone or PAS.
Users of fixed telephone can also send voice short message, and open CRBT (Coloring Ring Back Tone). "114" will provide more searching service……