Don’t be sad if you miss your favourite TV show or football game. Indonesian telco Telkom has a solution with video on demand (VOD) that you can watch anywhere and anytime. At a glance, the new UseeTV looks like local rival MivoTV where you can stream TV channels. The difference is you can pick the program that you missed from up to three days ago and watch them right now.
VOD streamed to TVs is not a new thing. FirstMedia debuted it last year with Showtime for its pay TV service. Telkom also introduced Groovia TV for online viewers. eGM Telkom Multimedia Division representative, Achmad Sugiarto, explained to us that Groovia TV was meant for the high-end market - and now Telkom releases UseeTV for a bigger audience which has unlimited data packages on their gadgets.
UseeTV supports 13 channels including local and national channels, even Al-Jazeera. On the ToVi page within the service, you can watch both Indonesian movies and international movies from the likes of Universal Studios. The video content is provided by Telkomvision, which is part of the Telkom Group. As for audio, by the end of this year there will be 350 radio stations that you can stream on the radio page.
Registering for this is free, but you will have to be a Telkom subscriber for one of its other products, like Speedy (internet provider), KartuHALO, or SimPATI for mobile services. Some of the content is free - though to enjoy most of the movies, you have to sign up for the premium package. Achmad says that they’re giving a special price:
Specially for our Telkom group subscribers, we give a premium package with 50 movies for only Rp 3.500 ($0.37). That is really cheap, and might even rival the price of pirated DVDs for some.
According to deputy eGM Telkom Multimedia Division representative, Bambang Lusmiadi, UseeTV has around 120,000 registrants in its first two months. Perhaps this is a result of the large number of users for its other services. Speedy itself has 2 million subscribers in Indonesia up to this month, and KartuHALO has 2.5 million users. SimPATI is the biggest of its service, bringing in 60 percent of Telkomsel’s income with 54.3 million users.
For the next step of product development, Telkom will maximize all of the company’s resources, even its satellites. Bambang showed me UseeTV’s mobile app running smoothly on an Android smartphone and on an iPhone - and they both look great, I reckon - showing that this kind of service can soon make the leap to mobile.