Friday, 03 September 2010
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Researchers run rule over IPTV prospects…
Last year subscribers to IPTV services worldwide numbered only about 13.5mn, but ABI Research forecasts this number will grow to more than 90mn by the end of 2013. Meantime, recent rune reading by the RNCOS research house is even more toro-ish, with worldwide IPTV subscribers forecast to reach to 103mn in 2011. The ABIs have it “The IPTV market as a whole is poised for strong growth,” says ABI senior analyst Cesar Bachelet, “but clearly it will be stronger in some areas than in others. ABI Research anticipates particularly substantial growth in In its analysis ‘Global IPTV Markets’ ABI points out that in North America, until recently, only a few Canadian operators and smaller rural/regional operators in the USA have offered IPTV services, although 2007 saw Verizon and AT&T begin to achieve some scale in their fibre deployments. The company believes IPTV growth in the Although IPTV got a head start in Asia when PCCW launched its successful IPTV service in ABI notes that IPTV has been available in Western Europe since 1999, so the market there is comparatively well-developed already, especially in countries such as These growing IPTV markets open an opportunity for vendors of the needed infrastructure: video servers, middleware, set-top boxes and more. Another opportunity arises from the migration from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 encoding (allowing high-definition) and the addition of new functionality to services, which requires new equipment and middleware. But that doesn’t translate to automatic success for vendors cautions ABI. “Operators are getting very picky when choosing their vendors,” judges Bachelet. “They want one with a proven track record, a history of supporting large-scale deployments.” And that cuts two ways: “For telcos, the road to IPTV could still be rocky, because for most, video is a brand new, very sophisticated business, and they are up against incumbent pay-TV operators who have established relationships and a great deal of experience.” Asia on the up says RNCOS In its IPTV analysis - ‘Global IPTV: Market Analysis and Forecast to 2011’ RNCOS found that the global IPTV market is currently dominated by Europe, reaching 1.9mn subscribers in 2007, but the research company expects that Asia will emerge as a stronger competitor to Europe in next few years. One of the reasons, as predicted by RNCOS, is a big hike in the number of broadband subscribers in the Asia-Pacific region. Here broadband uptake is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 91% from 2006 to 2011, with However, the Asia-Pacific PITV industry faces non-trivial challenges, among them access to high quality regional content and competition from well established cable and satellite providers. Spread betting Estimates of IPTV subscriber figures such as those cited above are very roughly in the same ballpark. Others aren’t, and the research community as a whole appears to be spreading its IPTV bets. Thus in analyses published in the not-too-distant past, Canalys has almost 40mn viewers by 2010 (click for details), the Multimedia Research Group (MRG) 72.6mn by 2011, and Infoma Telecoms & Media 38.4mn in 2012. It seems you pays your money (for your report), and you takes your choice. John Williamson |
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