Telenor Pakistan has launched a mobile TV service, which it says is the first in the country. Telenor Mobile TV will offer a range of channels starting with Al-Jazeera, ABC News, TV 1, Indus Plus, Indus Vision, Cartoon Classic, MTV-Pakistan, Channel G, Filmazia, Waseeb, AWT Khyber & KTN. More channels will be added soon. Chief Technical Officer Telenor Pakistan Peter Anthony Dindial, excited about the milestone achievement, said: “No longer is mobile TV confined to only 3G operators. With this industry-first service, delivered on Pakistan’s Largest GPRS/EDGE platform, Telenor customers can view multiple channels right on their handsets, making the Telenor customer truly special.” He added: “We are intent at making it easy for our customers to use advanced services and utilize the real potential of Telenor’s available technology and the quality of its network.” “We are delighted to be partnering with Telenor on delivering the first mobile TV service in Pakistan” said Jonathan Kendrick, Chairman and CEO of ROK Entertainment, which is providing the service to Telenor. “This is an exciting and wholly new development in mobile entertainment in Pakistan and heralds the start of an on-going process of ROK delivering even more innovative technologies and services to Telenor.”
Minister for Information Technology, Awais Ahmad Khan Leghari Friday projected a growth of 100 million mobile phone users within next three years due to what he called “a hunger for telephony and innovative services being introduced by operators.” He said a fast-paced progress and investment trends in the telecom sector were likely to continue for the next few years with major benefits accruing to the phone users. He stated this while unveiling CM Pak Limited - a company launched by China Mobile to run the erstwhile Paktel’s operations in Pakistan. “The entry of world’s largest telecom company China Mobile into Pakistan’s telecom market sends the right kind of signals for the nature of healthy competition and innovative services, the phone users are going to benefit from in the coming years,” he added. He opined that while mobile companies were expected to be embroiled into a stiff competition in the days ahead, the ultimate winners would be market players excelling in content provision which had the potential to drive the appetite for phones in coming years.
He said the launch of CM Pak was a historic occasion as it was for the first time that China Mobile had come out of China to invest into another country and it also marked a shift in the attitude of Chinese companies which had begun to invest in the service-based sector in Pakistan instead of looking merely for contracts for providing vendors’ services. Mr Awais observed that while the progress in telecom sector owed largely to the general appetite for better telephony, the credit was also due for the transparent policies introduced in the sector. "At no stage during the deregulation process or afterwards, there was any effort from any quarters within the government to bend rules and reward a sweetheart company or individual.