T-Home Launches Connected Life & Work as E-mail, Pictures and Music on the TV

| Jun 25, 2009 | Consumer Broadband Services - Europe | Competitive Update

| Analyst: Ben Tudor

Current Perspective: Positive
Vendor Importance: High
Market Impact: High

Event Summary

June 23, 2009 -- T-Home is offering Entertain customers the chance to read e-mail, check their eBay auctions and share pictures and music over their TV sets, PCs and mobile phones. Users have a gigabyte of online storage free of charge, with up to 10 GB available in total. Content can be shared between subscribers’ devices, as well as with others who are not using T-Home’s network or services. Other inclusive services include weather reports, horoscopes, local information and football scores.

Analytical Summary

• Current Perspective: Positive on T-Home’s new version of Entertain with elements from its Connected Life & Work philosophy, announced at CeBIT earlier this year (see CeBIT 2009: T-Home Unveils Cross Platform Strategy – Share Your Content (Not That of Others) on Three Screens, March 4, 2009), because it plays to T-Home’s strengths as an incumbent and as a multi-play provider. In a market with strong pay-TV and significant triple play competition, providers can no longer offer ‘just’ TV, voice and broadband, and T-Home is tying its services together with genuinely useful applications such as photo and music sharing.

• Vendor Importance: High to T-Home, as it allows the company to put further distance between itself and Vodafone and HanseNet, the other triple play providers of note, as they begin to offer combined services and look for a buyer, respectively. With competitors distracted, T-Home can get something of a head start with more complex services built on broadband, mobile networking and IPTV, and this is a positive result.

• Market Impact: High on the German triple play market, as this raises the level of competition. By building a technically more complex set of services, T-Home is raising the bar, and those that provide simple, clearly delineated services – video, voice and data – will have to either emulate T-Home or take on other strategies.

CLIENTS ONLY

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

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Recommended Competitor Actions

• Vodafone should play to its mobile strengths and start building out a similar service based on mobile phone camera uploads to a central hub similar to T-Home’s Mediencenter. Using the mobile network to move MMS messages and picture uploads is lucrative for Vodafone, and it should consider building in photo storage and display on Arcor TV and via Web space as a means to boost mobile network data usage.

• KDG and Unitymedia should also embrace user-generated content and play to their own strengths, notably cable network capacity. Video content sharing and user-generated content has proven to be of interest to customers of SFR/neuf cegetel and Free in France, and perhaps this could be replicated in Germany.

• HanseNet’s TV and broadband services could be more ‘joined up,’ and while this might take serious investment, proof of innovative thinking and projects may help the company find a buyer in the medium to long term.

CLIENTS ONLY

Competitive Positives and Concerns

Recommended Vendor Actions

| Client access - Full report in Consumer Broadband Services - Europe | More information

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