Shanghai will offer a two-year conditional free IPTV service to expand its IPTV user base.
The city's IPTV operator BesTV will cooperate with Shanghai Telecom to launch a sales promotion until June 30 targeting the city with unlimited-time 2M or 1M ADSL services. During the period, the company will exempt eligible users from paying the RMB310 installation fee and two years' IPTV service fee if they can spend more than eight days a month browsing IPTV. The parties say that they will charge 2M ADSL users RMB22 per month and 1M ADSL user RMB27 per month if they fail to spend eight days using IPTV. The charge for those ADSL users in the suburbs of the city is even higher: RMB27 per month for 2M users and RMB32 per month for 1M users.
Yang Bingfeng, team leader of Shanghai Telecom's IPTV Business, said that the sales promotion is mainly organized to attract more IPTV users. Yang said that 80% of Shanghai's three million ADSL users are eligible for this service and they hope that the total users of IPTV of the city will reach 800,000 by the end of this year.
Currently, there is not a mature business pattern for the promotion of IPTV in China. Some users complain that images in IPTV programs are not so clear.
