Airtel launches another useless service – Broadband TV

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Airtel has an unprecedented record of offering totally useless and crappy “value added” services to users. Continuing with this tradition, they have recently launched “broadband TV” – a service that lets you watch live TV over your broadband connection.

No, this is NOT their IPTV service. In IPTV, you need a special set top box which makes a separate private connection from your home to the service provider’s servers to get the feed of live TV channels. WIth broadband TV, you will watch the live TV in a browser using your broadband connection – similar to watching a youtube video.

The service has been launched in partnership with a company called Apalya and offers three plans:

• Gold Plan – This plan offers all the channels (currently 19) round the clock. at the price of INR 99 per month.
• Night Plan – This plan offers all the channels (currently 19) between 9 pm and 9 am at the price of INR 49 per month.
• My Pack – This plan offers any 3 channels of your choice round the clock at the price of INR 49 per month.

The gold and night plans also offer video on demand and movies channels in addition to the 19 live TV channels.

Needless to say, as this service uses your broadband data connection to stream live TV, they will eat up your FUP quota unless Airtel excuses this service from consuming that.

I believe that Airtel launched primarily launched this service for its mobile 3G subscribers to watch live TV on the go, and then randomly decided to offer this to broadband customers as well.

In this age of youtube, twitter, and news apps with video support, I am not sure how many people will be interested in subscribing to such a service. In any case, if you are interested, hop on to https://www.airtelbroadbandtv.com.