The Tech65 crew was over at the Singtel Hot Sale convention over at Suntec City’s convention hall 404 to check out the mioTV after noticing the Microsoft Mediaroom logo at the corner of one of it’s broshures. Unfortunately, due to the fact that their people were too busy, we did not get a chance to report it live with Channel65.

My take on this whole deal though is going to be in specialty which is the softer side of things. And thus we look at all the other wonderful things that differentiates this service from Starhub’s current cable service.

For those of you who do not already subscribe to Starhub’s cable TV service, here’s a quick update. Starhub has had the monopoly over premium television service and has been able to implement their own plans and lock its users into plans that guaranteed revenue. Most importantly of course, they also had all the important majors under their belt. Football games were only to be broadcast by its own channels, CNN could only be obtained by users of Starhub’s cable service. Singtel’s entry into this segment is much welcome as it gives the average consumer choice and introduces competition that allows for companies to attempt to compete on different price points, for different consumers.

However lets talk about the service itself. Its based on Microsoft’s Mediaroom technology and is only one of two companies to use this particular set of technology. Now what does this mean for the average consumer, it means coherence, it means consistency and it also means wide support *hopefully*. But having a big company like Microsoft backing your tech is never a bad thing to have. MioTV is quite good in that respect in that it seems quite polished a user interface and the sheer fountain of features that come out of the box. First of all, HD straight out of the box without any additional fee or otherwise, a DVR out of the box, and lots of on demand movies for your viewing pleasure.

However there is one major problem at this stage with Singtel’s MioTV service and that is simply a lack of available content for the consumer to subscribe to. And this can only be remedied by judicious courting by Singtel at the end of Starhub’s contracts with any content provider in Singapore. We look forward enthusiastically to the possiblities in the emergance of competition between these two bigwigs in Singaporean content provision!