KT to invest $1.5 billion in IPTV

South Korea's Korean Telecom is planning for a commercial launch of linear IPTV service next month, and the telco said this week that it plans to invest about $1.5 billion in its IPTV efforts by 2012. KT currently is testing its service and expects to have around 300,000 subscribers for linear broadcast IPTV by the end of this year. Moreover, the company hopes to see the service break even by 2011 and collect 3 million subscribers by the end of 2012, according to IPTV News.

KT's announcement comes not long after the Korean government awarded IPTV licenses to KT and competitors Hanaro Telecom and LG Dacom. All three of those carriers actually already offer video-on-demand IPTV services via their broadband networks. Hanaro Telecom has been ahead of incumbent KT in that area, signing up close to 1 million subscribers, while KT has around 700,000 from its MegaTV service.

For more:
- see this report [1] at IPTV News

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Hanaro Telecom saw a TV subscriber surge in 2007 [3]