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Global IPTV subscriptions pass 12 million |
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Monday, 17 March 2008 |
The total number of IPTV subscribers grew by 117% in 2007 to reach 12.34 million, up from 5.71 million at the end of 2006, according to new research contained in the World Broadband Information Service from Informa Telecoms and Media.
The biggest world region by far remains
Western Europe, which passed 6.9 million IPTV subscribers in 2007 to account for 57% of the global total. The bulk of subscriptions were in
France, where incumbent France Telecom and alternative operators Free, Neuf and Telecom Italia’s Alice, had attracted more than 5 million IPTV customers by bundling the service free with broadband. Whilst a large proportion of these subscribers may not be paying for additional content, they do receive free-to-air channels with their basic triple play packages.
France is in a league of its own when it comes to IPTV subscriptions. The country has nearly 10 times as many IPTV subscriptions as second-placed
Spain and close to 75% of the
Western Europe total.
Some of
Western Europe’s larger operators finished 2007 with more modest bases. Although Deutsche Telekom and BT more than doubled their subscriber numbers to more than 100,000 each, both still have some way to go to match the relative gains reached by their incumbent counterparts elsewhere.
Simon Murray, Principal Analyst (TV & Media) comments: "2007 was a watershed year for IPTV as many Western European telcos launched full packages. It will be interesting to note their approach to IPTV in the future: whether it is used to increase customer loyalty or whether it is a genuine money-making stand-alone service."
Notable gains were also made by the Asia-Pacific region where
China is now at or around the one million subscriber mark, with SMG, delivering IPTV in
Harbin and
Shanghai grew nine-fold in the year. It still has slightly fewer IPTV subscribers than in Hong Kong, which passed the one million mark in September and is now the world’s most mature IPTV market, serving TV to 60per cent of DSL customers.
The
USA too, has begun to make headway, adding more than one million customers in 2007, largely on the back of fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) roll-outs led by Verizon (FiOS) and AT&T Broadband. Less than half of the broadband subscribers in the
USA, connected using FTTH view their TV over their broadband connection.
Relative to competing multi-channel platforms, IPTV is still in the first phase of roll out and growth, with just 55 operators representing over 99% of global IPTV subscribers and IPTV itself representing less than 3% of all global multi-channel subscribers.
www.informa.com |
