Multichoice in drive to educate public about iTV
Multichoice Africa has embarked on intensive marketing of its interactive television (iTV) to clarify services after finding that some members of the public still confuse iTV with MNet.
The iTV services were made available to the public in July.
iTV offers TV-Mail, TV-Shopping, a DStv guide, games and interactive options built into programmes such as Big Brother. M-Web provides the back-end to the shopping mall, which is similar to internet shopping. Future iTV offerings will include online banking and more games.
The technology behind iTV is much the same as the internet, with viewers accessing services through a fixed telephone line connected to a DStv decoder via a modem. Subscribers have to either upgrade their existing decoders or buy new, updated ones.
Only certain decoders are capable of enabling iTV and subscribers first have to go to Channel 99 on DStv to verify the capability of their decoder. The only additional hardware needed is a DStv Modem and Infrared Keyboard which allows for easier message typing.
The interactive options built into Big Brother 2 has spurred many people into subscribing to iTV with 5000 iTV keyboards being sold within six weeks.
