Talk about mobile TV brings me back many years – maybe as many as five years – when the first 3G phones came to town in all their bulky and overheated glory. Who can forget how pixelated and jerky the mobile TV or videos were when they were demo’d on these early 3G wonders?

Thus, seeing StarHub launch its new mobile TV offering today reminds me of how far we have come in mobile phone technology.

It’s no wonder StarHub’s new CEO Neil Montefiore, facing the media for the first time in his new role, kicked off the launch today by stressing how much things have changed since those lousy mobile TV programmes of old.

Phones today, he notes, are faster and smarter. Networks too, are keeping up with bandwidth over the air. And finally, the content is appreciated now  – young audiences are no longer averse to watching news or sports on the small screen.

What do StarHub have on offer then? Essentially 24 channels – including CNN, Disney and TVBJ – will be viewable on the small screen for just $1 a day. If you like what you see and want to view it everyday, there’s a $25-a-month subscription that you can sign up for.

Tired of pesky relatives asking when you are getting married or having kids during Chinese New Year? Turn on the karaoke at home, with a new on-demand service that StarHub is delivering soon over its cable set-top box.

For just S$4.50 a day, you can sing to your heart’s content – or get your relatives to stop discussing your personal life – while they are gathered at your place over CNY. If you like it so much, you can also sign up for a S$10-a-month subscription and sing all you want at home.

The new service, called KaraOK!, is not StarHub’s first foray into home karaoke. But this version coming online on January 18 will offer on-demand access to an eventual 30,000 music videos in various languages.

HBO for free

Not sure if this is another ploy by StarHub to keep viewers, as it readies to lose its Barclays Premier League (BPL) progammes next season, but you can now watch all StarHub cable TV channels on your set-top box.

Apparently, this “unlocking” of the channels – which includes premium ones like HBO – started late last night and is continuing now into Sunday morning.

We are still not sure why there are free programmes. Whether this is an unwitting Christmas present from StarHub or a smart ploy to get users to see its other channels, we still don’t know.

But if you have always wanted to see what you are missing on the channels you never paid for, power up your StarHub set-top box and fire away on the remote. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Often a tolerant lot, Singaporeans can accept a lot of things – slow broadband speeds, lack of full number portability (until last year) and even not being able to choose their government (in some wards).

But one thing they can’t stand, joked a journalist pal of mine, is to have their weekend football fix taken away. Should that happen, he declared, there’d be a “RIOOOOT!”

That perhaps explains why the Singapore media authorities did a stunning U-turn yesterday, saying that they might just  make SingTel share its fresh-in-the-bag Barclays Premier League rights with StarHub come next year.

Acting Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts Lui Tuck Yew, even went so far as to say the government was considering an universal pay-TV set-top box for Singapore homes, so that people don’t have to get two set-top boxes to watch BPL on SingTel and other popular channels that StarHub carries.

English Premier League

Maybe it’s the rumblings on the ground.

Maybe it’s StarHub playing the public card of late – appealing to the public, and more likely, its pay-TV subscibers, in full-page newspaper ads to group together and “share their views” on SingTel’s EPL (English Premier League) win for the next three seasons.

Whatever the reason, the red camp has today come up with prices to tune in to live EPL matches from next year, and it has kept to its promise of not asking for more cash.

SingTel 1 StarHub 0

Now, that was fast. Less than 48 hours after SingTel and StarHub submitted their bids for the English Premier League (EPL) TV rights for the next three seasons, the red camp has just confirmed that it has won the fight to screen the live matches.

Yes, you will be watching EPL on a SingTel mio TV box from mid-2010, the first time that the broadband pay-TV operator has wrested the rights from the incumbent pay-TV provider.

Most importantly for football fans, SingTel Singapore CEO Allen Lew has promised no price hikes.

First, it was on. Then, we’re not so sure.

Without the protagonists even speaking a word about it, the market has been filled with talk of a possible SingTel-StarHub joint bid for the upcoming three seasons of exclusive Barclays Premier League (BPL) content.

Yet, after days of drama, consumers are still no clearer on whether they will 1) have to pay more because of the higher bids predicted 2) buy two set-top boxes to watch different matches should the bids be split.

Source: The Daily Mirror UK

Is “free football” coming to a pay-TV market distorted by exclusive content deals?

That’s not a National Day joke. It’s one fierce promotional ploy that SingTel is announcing today, just days before the football season kicks off for fans here with the FA Charity Shield this weekend.

Basically, the “red” telco is dangling two months of free access to its football channels which show the Italian Serie A, Uefa Europa League and most importantly, the Uefa Champions League, to tempt you to sign up for a trial of its mio TV service.

This offer is open to both SingTel mio TV and mio Home customers til August 19. Oh wait, StarHub’s pay-TV sports group subscribers can also get on for a free ride – as long as they turn up at a SingTel shop with their identity cards and cable TV bills by the end of September.

In one of the surprises of the rather boring telecom scene here in Singapore, StarHub has just announced that it is going to be led by the former CEO of rival telco MobileOne, Neil Montefiore.

Current StarHub CEO Terry Clontz, who is retiring in January 2010, will be succeeded by Neil, who left M1 earlier this year in a move that also surprised many market watchers.

When a friend from M1 said that he would “re-surface” soon, I, like many watching the scene, had not expected him to turn up as the CEO of the “other” challenger to SingTel here in Singapore.

Still, when you think about it, this seems like a smart move for both StarHub and Neil. After all, M1 was the original challenger to SingTel in the partial liberalisation of the telecoms market here in the mid-1990s. When M1 burst onto the scene then, it quickly signed up mobile users who wanted an alternative to SingTel.

Bye, bye, old analog StarHub box

The writing’s been on the wall, but StarHub is finally going to turn off its analog cable TV channels and go fully digital from June 30, 2009.

Already, 96 per cent of its cable customers are on digital – a result of switching over customers since 2004, when the first digital set-top boxes went out to homes.

Over the years, StarHub’s mostly used the “carrot” rather than “stick” to encourage homes to go digital. New programmes were offered on its digital tiers, and when old analog boxes went bonkers, subscribers were encouraged to switch to the digital boxes.

Then, there were stuff like the Hubstation, essentially a digital set-top box rolled in with a video recorder, free phone line and 1Mbps broadband. Why would you want an analog box that has been around since 1995?

I actually think digital TV hadn’t come fast enough.