Paul McIntyre: Telco moving away from its mammoth fixed line business

Slowly, slowly over the next couple of weeks the Australian masses are going to get a fair whiff of Telstra's straight-shootin' American boss Sol Trujillo and his "customer-centric, next-generation" telecommunications company.

Trujillo has copped a bucketload from the federal Government and the markets over his gloomy profit outlook as he attempts to overhaul the telco giant.

His repeated warnings to Canberra to go light on competition regulation or things will only get worse have also contributed to the crossfire. But that's the business and political sphere.

On Monday, Telstra is taking an upbeat message to the great unwashed, starting with a new Commonwealth Games marketing spruik for, among other things, TV-style content delivered over Telstra's 3G mobile phones and via its BigPond broadband internet service.

The idea is that Telstra may be on the nose with investors but it can still throw tens of millions at the public in a bid to be at least loved by them and grab more of their money.

Already this week Telstra's internet division unveiled its new BigPond Movie downloading service which allows customers to rent and view recent-release movies and TV shows via an internet download to PCs.

The internet, by the way, is one of Trujillo's core strategic planks as he moves the telco away from its mammoth but faltering fixed line business.

In doing so, however, Trujillo must tread very quickly with his 50 per cent stake in pay TV group Foxtel, which also offers pay-per-view movie services.

Telstra's other partners in Foxtel are Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd and the Packer-controlled Publishing & Broadcasting. As part of a deal with Foxtel's media mogul owners, Telstra has agreed not to offer services similar to Foxtel, which means none of its content can hit TV screens. Technically anyway. The BigPond folks were at pains on Wednesday to ensure that message got through.

However, those that really do want to download their $5.95 movie or $1.95 TV show and watch it on the big screen rather than a PC can do.

But as BigPond's group managing director Justin Milne put it, only "if they can work out the black wire and the yellow wire and the red wire" and connect them to the computer. But that clumsy scenario might too be usurped in the next 12 months. Already a few tech-heads have pointed out that chipmaker Intel will launch a new silicon chip called Viiv next month, allowing computer users to redirect what's on the PC screen to TV sets. It's all going to get very blurry indeed and for Telstra and Foxtel's media mogul owners it could still get nasty.

But back to Telstra's propaganda machine. As part of the oncoming Telstra marketing blitz, a week or two after its Commonwealth Games effort begins next week and before the Games start in Melbourne, Telstra's big-budget branding campaign will roll out.

This is the campaign that has untold heads and hands from the very top at Telstra all over it. That's because it's the single piece of marketing propaganda Telstra needs as a catalyst to shift public sentiment in its favour.

It will have to be bloody good. In the 1990s Telstra spent millions telling us it was "making life easier", which of course was bollocks. Everything actually went the other way.

The new line personally approved by Trujillo was to be "It's great when it all comes together" - alluding to Trujillo's push to make Telstra's phone, internet and information/content services user-friendly to the masses.

But apparently there's some jostling on that one just a few weeks out from launch.

We can assume, however, the theme of the new campaign will be broadly the same and we can also assume there will be a battalion of nervous marketing and ad types bobbing around waiting to see if their communication baby will grow legs for Sol.

If, indeed, Telstra's grand plan to win over the masses does work, Trujillo is halfway to shifting the big ship up a gear. If it doesn't, then in a few months' time Telstra HQ won't be a flash spot to be when the new boss lets off some Mexican steam.