CABLE and Wireless has rolled out its first interactive digital TV travel service to 50,000 homes in Manchester.
The new travel section features six separate Internet-style sites, all specially designed for TV, offering a range of different travel products.
Participating companies are ABC Traveltime, British Airways, Bargainholidays, lastminute.com, a2btravel and 1Ski.
Customers are able to use their remote control to search the different sites for destination information, accommodation, flights and special offers.
Altogether, Cable and Wireless is offering 100 new interactive TV sites covering sectors such as news, sport and entertainment. It has also introduced the facility to send e-mail over the TV for the first time.
“It’s a TV Internet service,” said a Cable and Wireless spokesman. “It is a matter of repackaging Web sites and putting them in a TV context.”
Launched last July, the company’s interactive TV arm expects to have 140,000 subscribers with a digital cable connection by next March. Eventually, it hopes to attract 2m customers in regions including London, Cheshire and the Midlands.
Cable and Wireless claims its service is faster and cheaper than British Sky Broadcasting’s recently-launched Open TV service, which already has 1.25m subscribers (Travel Weekly October 18). The Cable and Wireless spokesman explained that his company uses a cable-based modem whereas Open uses a telephone modem, which requires users to pay line rental and call-up charges on top of their basic subscription.
“With Open you can’t use the interactive TV facility and the telephone at the same time,” he said. “With our interactive service you can call up your partner and talk to them about the holidays that are available while you are still browsing.”