Paraguay’s new pay-TV operations nowhere to be seen, but mobile TV launches

Juan Pablo Conti ©RapidTVNews | 02-02-2012

It's been a long story of unfulfilled expectations from Copaco and Tigo, two of Paraguay's main telecom operators.
On several occasions over the past 12 months have they claimed they were just a few weeks away from launching new pay-TV services – only for the supposed launch date to come and go and their respective IPTV and CATV networks to remain fully switched off.

Now, at least one of the companies has something to show off on the pay-TV front, even if it's still not quite what the market has been expecting. Tigo, the country's largest mobile phone operator, has launched a modest mobile TV service.
Called TV Móvil Tigo, it offers only five TV channels. Four of them (El 13, Telefuturo, SNT and Paravisión) are nationally available terrestrial TV channels, to which one of American music video network MTV's channels has been added.
From a strictly technical standpoint, the service is not using any of the standards developed specifically for the provision of mobile TV. Instead, the channels are Web streamed via the same 3G radio interface that Tigo uses to deliver cellular communications.
For that reason, in order to be able to access the mobile TV bouquet, subscribers need a streaming-enabled, 3G-compatible smartphone and a 3G subscription, which will allow them to consume cellular airtime as if they were using any other type of wireless broadband communication.
The five TV channels are available on the operator's WAP site, wap.tigo.com.py.

Tigo, which in El Salvador offers a similar mobile TV service free of charge, has introduced a pricing scheme for the Paraguayan market with airtime charged by the second (US$0.0015), the day (US$0.23) or the month (US$1). Monthly plans are automatically renewed.