Sing your Chinese New Year blues away on StarHub karaoke service

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.

I say eventual, because only 5,000 videos will be available at launch, with 100 added every week after.

Unveiling the service today, StarHub execs were keen to show off its ease of use – you use the same remote controller for  your StarHub Hubstation or Hubstation HD box to select and play the tracks. And unlike at a karaoke lounge, you can pause the song, go to the toilet and come back to sing again.

The only catch is you will need one of these interactive Hubstation set-top boxes – StarHub will have an offer to swap out your old digital set-top box for a Hubstation.

You’ll also need a mic, of course, to make a nuisance of yourself and kill your neighbour’s  afternoon nap.

But all in, this looks like a smart way to keep the karaoke fans among us glued to a high-end StarHub box, as competition intensifies in the coming months with SingTel offering live Barclays Premier League (BPL) on its rival mio TV service.

So far, there’s nothing here that’s similar to what StarHub offers, certainly not at this price. The Xbox Lips game, for example, lets you download mainly English tracks, not Mandarin or Cantonese songs that home-bound crooners here crave.

I’m not sure StarHub makes much money here, but this karaoke service sure looks like a good ploy to keep people subscribing to its TV channels, which you will use your set-top box for most of the time anyway.