Convergence In India - underlined by Innovation

There is compelling evidence to suggest that the convergence phenomenon will sweep through India as well, but equally, there's plenty of proof that it will have a unique shape, meter and velocity.

I would expect, for starters that India will see a huge amount of innovation. The early signs are there already. In the IPTV segment, rather than build monolithic yet stratified organisations (which is how you might describe most Telcos rushing to do content on IPTV), MTNL has contracted 3rd parties such as Aksh Optifibre to run the IPTV content service on it's pipes. The technology infrastructure - including middleware and DRM is entirely provided by UTStarcom. This approach makes small investments possible for these local players. When I met with Aksh they explained their numbers were quite modest, but it seems to me that IPTV can be profitable at those numbers.

The real killer app in this case may well be the residential VOIP service being rolled out - which will allow users to call US (for example) for a very nominal Rupee rate. Watch this space.

While IPTV may be shackled by the extremely poor broadband penetration - the mobile uptake in India obviously has no such problems. Yet another innovation (and an example of how the Indian public will at least try anything thats new) is the live via animation genre. An example of this is the Intvo application that provides "live" cricket on mobile phones.