NEW YORK – Verizon Communications Inc. is set to announce that its new television service will be launched in Texas, perhaps next week, opening a fresh era of direct competition between the cable TV and telephone industries,
The launch schedule, pricing and channel selection for the service, called FiOS TV, are expected to be detailed today, according to a Verizon official, who asked not to be identified to avoid pre-empting the company’s announcement.
Possible details of the FiOS TV launch were posted earlier this month on a Web forum at BroadbandReports.com. Some postings indicate that some residents in the Dallas suburb of Keller already have had the necessary equipment and wiring installed by the company or have scheduled installations.
Verizon has declined to confirm that.
Keller is one of the first markets where Verizon began replacing the copper lines in its local telephone network with fiber-optic cables, which can deliver faster Internet connections and hundreds of channels of cable TV and video-on-demand, as well as interactive combinations of TV, Internet and phone service.
Verizon is investing billions on the initiative, which calls for large swaths of its network serving 3 million homes to be rewired for the new services by the end of the year.
Another large telephone company, SBC Communications Inc., is also spending heavily to upgrade its network for video. The anticipated broad market launch of that service has been delayed from late this year to an unspecified date in early 2006, possibly because of technological problems.
Where Verizon is planning to start with conventional cable video technology to deliver its service, SBC is using a largely unproven technology called IPTV, which transmits channels using the same Internet protocol format as other types of Web traffic.
The push into TV comes as U.S. cable providers are rolling out phone services using IP technology. As of midyear, they had snared about 1.4 million telephone subscribers.
As part of the foray into cable, Verizon and SBC have been championing state and national legislation that would eliminate requirements that they secure individual cable licenses from each of the thousands of municipalities where they hope to sell subscription TV.
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