Quick look at TATA Photon TV -> Wireless television streaming / broadcasting via TATA Photon+
TATA indicom becomes the first Indian ISP to offer live television streaming via its EVDO / HSIA wireless network. Recently TATAindicom has tied up with Apalya Technologies, a Hyderabad based company to launch the Photon TV service on Adobe Air platform.
TATAindicom is presently providing the CDMA 1x service in 22 states and has a large EDVO / HSIA network on most of the big cities.
How to get Photon TV
You may start the service by downloading the TV viewing tool. Which is around 17MB and available for free download.
Do take a note here, the Adobe Air run time given with this tool seems to be out dated as right after the installation, my adobe update center informed me that there is an updated version of Adobe Air run time available. Meaning another 10+MB of download.
Presently the application supports only Windows platform and I have tested and found it working with XP (x64) / Vista (x64) and Win 7 (x64).
The Application interface / How to use TATA Photon TV
The main start up screen of the application would through you a window with 3 options
- Channel list
- My channels
- Help
For a first time user, you may find My Channel to be empty. Where as under Channel list, you can click any channel to get the option to select your subscription.
Tariff / price and subscription Plans
- Single Channel : @ Rs. 4 per month.
- My 10 : Combination of 10 channels @ Rs 29 per month.
- My Full Pack : All channels @Rs75 per month.
- Around 2 MB/minute of
data consumption while streaming.
There are around 40 channels available to chose from and under Full Pack, you get to see all of them. It may appear dead cheap given that you can watch it in your notebook while you are in move but the biggest down side is that TATA is going to charge you for streaming video.
It seems, it is consuming around 2 MB of data for each minute of streaming, meaning even if I am under the top plan (15GB), still I would run out of bandwidth within 125 to 130 hours. That’s around 4 hours of TV each day for Rs. 1500/- + 10% TAX.
How is the performance
Its developed with Adobe Air. Meaning Web technology brought to desktop. It feels like streaming youtube but via a desktop based application.
So everything depends on the speed of the device and network. Although the HSIA network which is suppose to be a 3.1 MBPS network but on real time, if having 95+ singal bar and off peak hours, like night time, the real time speed stays around 2 mbps and streaming seems quite OK with occasional lags while my mail client or any other application is accessing the network.
But its a big let down when I am on move, like accessing it from a moving car or at peak hours like at noon. There is a lot of lag on real time streaming.
Verdict and final call
TATA has the edge now over its competitors like BSNL (EVDO) and RelianceNET connect (HSIA) as they are the first to offer this service.
But Rs. 1500/- + Rs. 75/- + 10% TAX for 4 hours of TV per day (2mb/m with highest data plan) and then Rs. 1 for per minute of TV ??
Certainly not a service for me at-least.
But people like share traders and business owner will like it a lot as they can watch their favorite business channel like CNBC TB 18 or NDTV profit, right on their notebook while enjoying their coffee break or a little outing.
Jeet Chowdhury on December 26th, 2009
can i use this application over bsnl broadband?