GO plc today announced its Interactive TV product, which forms part of its current major investment programme.

Interactive television will be delivered to customers over ADSL using fibre technologies, offering customers a range of features such as Restart (which goes back to the beginning of a live programme), Catch Up (an on demand archive), pause and rewind, recording and games and widgets.

Last year GO announced that it would be investing €100 million over the coming six years.  €16 million were invested last year and by the end of this year GO intends to have spent another €20 million.

"The investment in new technologies is in line with GO's technology roadmap investment and will see the roll-out of Next Generation Network including fibre-to-the-cabinet, mobile network upgrades and investments in the infrastructure to cover new services and applications – including GO interactive tv," the company said.

GO said that the introduction of TV over internet was a massive undertaking to lay a fibre optic network which also enables it  to offer much higher speeds and capacity.

GO is deploying the network  in conjunction with awider upgrading of the current network, specifically in the last mile towards the users, with the installation of new cabinets that provide higher internet and data speeds.  GO's target is to have 75 per cent of Maltese households benefiting from fibre by the end of the year.

GO selected Minerva's platform for IPTV delivery and will shortly be announcing details of the set-top boxes to be used in conjunction with IPTV.

Details of the IPTV package will be announced in the  near future. 

Addressing members of the press at the GO event held at The Villa at Balluta Bay in St Julians, Vanessa Macdonald, Manager, Public, Media Relations & Corporate Communications at GO said: "IPTV is clearly an exciting development – in fact IPTV will change the way in which customers watch tv, giving them the control they deserve to watch what they want, when they want to."