Smart Telecom is making a €2.5 million bet that it can win back consumer confidence by offering a suite of services based around an interactive internet protocol television (IPTV) platform.
Smart is investing in the latest platform from broadcast technology firm Thomson, which will enable it to provide what it claims will be the first truly integrated triple-play voice, video and data service in Ireland.
When fully deployed, the platform will enable Smart to provide functions such as the ability to access a selection of television programmes that have already been broadcast, to view and manage voicemail through an on-screen interface, and to create a "zap list" of favourite channels which can be browsed by scrolling through live previews.
Smart is also exploring electronic commerce options, including signing exclusive deals with local food delivery services such as pizza restaurants. This will allow subscribers to order food on their television, with the cost appearing on their Smart bill at the end of the month.
Thomson's SmartVision platform (which is also the name of the Smart offering) is being used by France Telecom, in what is the world's largest deployment of IPTV to date, with more than 750,000 subscribers.
In a demonstration for The Irish Timesthis week, Smart technical operations director Ronan Kelly showed how Thomson has integrated the television platform with a telephony switch so that users can make and manage calls through an on-screen interface.
He also pointed out that Thomson's platform could support mobile telephony and the emerging IMS standard for delivering internet services to mobiles.
"We are taking things to the next level by turning the television into a bidirectional communications portal," said Mr Kelly.
Smart has approximately 2,000 subscribers on its existing IPTV platform. A major limiting factor of this system is that it is based on the Mpeg-2 video standard, which has poor compression capabilities. As a result, it requires seven megabits per second of bandwidth for just a standard television channel.
The new service will deliver Mpeg-4 video, which only requires two megabits per second for each television in the home. As a result, the number of subscribers it can address with the service is much larger.
Despite the debacle last year which saw Smart's residential telephony customers left without service, the company has managed to retain 15,000 residential broadband customers, who can sign up for the new IPTV service from November 1st. It will be marketed to new customers from January next.
In addition to the majority of the Dublin area, the service will be available in Cavan, Portlaoise, Letterkenny, Sligo, Galway, Ennis, Shannon, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, Wexford and Dundalk. This equates to almost 35 per cent coverage of the population.
Two set-top boxes will be available, with the more advanced version featuring a personal video recorder with an 80 gigabyte hard drive. The service will initially have limited high-definition (HD) content, but Mr Kelly said the plan was to launch a full HD service next year.
Smart chief operations officer Pio Murtagh said the firm was a different entity since it had been refinanced by a group led by Kingspan's Brendan Murtagh.
"Our dependence on third parties has been greatly reduced and the focus going forward will be on using our own network to reach customers," he said.
Smart is one of the biggest customers of the Government's Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs), which operate in 27 towns around the State.
Mr Murtagh said relations with Eircom were "very civil".
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