California-based UTStarcom has been awarded a contract for China’s largest deployment of IPTV, making it the company’s fourth contract in the People’s Republic. The contract, signed with China Netcom, concludes a successful commercial trial of its RollingStream end-to-end IPTV service in the city of Harbin that began in May of 2005, with a capacity of 100,000 concurrent media streams. Since the launch, the service’s subscriber base has grown to about 53,000. UTStarcom’s three other Chininese commercial contracts, in Shanghai, Fuzhou and Quanzhou, have a combined capacity of over 50,000 media streams.
The Harbin IPTV service includes 60 channels of live broadcast television with ‘time-shifting’ capabilities, 48-hour TV-on-demand and 5,000 hours of video-on-demand. Other features include an on-line weather report, searching services and information browsing. Harbin is the capital of the Heilongjiang Province in Northeast China, with a population of almost ten million, over a third of which are located within the city.