ORCA "A Whale of a company"

Nice one Mr Tense...

Nothing really substantive on this one apart from the following:

Indicates Chungwa are serious about rolling MOD out (currently only 30,000 users I think using the ORCA middleware... and so are thinking strategically about how to gear up for it..

This is important as one of the worries for a company like ORCA is that the telecos don't even decide to offer tripple play or delay it by a year or so..

Secondly we have an indication of the number of high speed internet users Chngwa has which at 1.27m makes their aim to offer 1m tipple play eventually entirely reasonable.... especially given the number of total internet connections at 2.4m (which will soon all be broadband).....And with broadband use no doubt growing over there..

So anyway, the point being that Chungwa is a top company with all the customers.. in the jargon a tier one teleco or an incumbant like BT is in the UK... i.e dominant position and established customer relationships...

This is in fact the customer that is closest to big number commercialisation for ORCA especially given their order of set top boxes (other story 1/2 million 4mpeg ordered by Chungwa)...

So we should hope to get the big number ramp-up of say 500,000 in the new year early on..

The reason Chunwa has waited until now is probably that the 4mpeg compression standard (uses half the bandwidth) of 2mpeg previous standard is only becoming available this year... I.e. go to Amino web site and they say they will have a 4mpeg set top box coming out shortly in 2005...

I have watched the Chungwa thing closely and was worried that in another announcement Alcatel appeared to be involved and I wasn't sure if they were testing their middleware...

But the point is 2005 is supposed to be the year of IPTV... A big deployment by Chungwa to say 500,000 would be the biggest to date in the world.....
this is what the Orca's valuation is riding on... but we need new contracts to get some further major upside......

The way I see it is that the IPTV market will explode 2005 and 2006 with announcements by BT, Amino and other companies testament to that... Orca just needs a reasonable slice of the market to do well...

Ok type scenario is gets a few deals 2005 and slowly moves on existing deals...

Good scenario is a number of deals coming through and all existing customers try to offer big numbers..

Excellent scenario is a number of 1m customer deals with licenses purchased upfront and possible extensions.... Remember the Microsoft SBC deal was for 18m customers and was worth $400m i.e. $20 per tv... just one big number deal like that woudl be great... i.e say the former incumbent in Poland being serious about IPTV woudl be enough... just to make the point that only need one big company getting into IPTV in a big way choosing ORCA...

Bad scenario would be Chungwa or someone else not going for Orca... after some kind of problem... i.e. choosing Alcatel... which seems to supply them with something....

So we should find out one way or another in the first quarter or first half of 05......

The slapster