Broadband lines are now installed in 313 million homes and IPTV has reached over 8 million of these, according to research released by the DSL Forum at last week’s Broadband World Forum in Berlin, and prepared by UK researcher Point Topic.
The IPTV numbers have risen by 179% over a 12 month period with growth strongest in Europe, with almost 5 million IPTV subscribers by the middle of 2007.
Around half of these were in France, where there has been a strong performance from incumbent, France Telecom, which is trying to shake off newcomers Free and Neuf Cegetel. Every major European incumbent has some form of IPTV service in operation the report says, and Telefonica in Spain added nearly 200,000 TV subscribers over this same period, with both Belgacom signing up 120,000 in Belgium.
In our own research due out shortly on the world’s quadruple play markets we noted that Belgacom and KPN between then have half a million TV customers in a population of just 26.9 million. This is using technology provided by Siemens, now part of Nokia Siemens, and using IPTV middleware software from Myrio, itself acquired by Siemens a few years ago. By contrast the services at Deutsche Telekom and British Telecom, working on Microsoft software have been slower to add subscribers, with just 35,000 and 20,000 customers respectively.
Asia Pacific has long had two IPTV leaders in PCCW in Hong Kong which now has 818,000 IPTV subscribers, and at Chunghwa in Taiwan has added 200,000 IPTV accounts in the year to June 30th 2007, as IPTV finally takes off there in volume.
In the Americas, IPTV is best seen as a response to triple-play competition from the cable networks. Verizon has had a successful 12 months signing up new customers to its TV over fibre service. AT&T has now started to connect TV customers, after some delays.
IPTV Subscribers worldwide in 1000s
Region H1 2007 H1 2006 H1 2005
Asia Pacific 2176 987 612
Europe 4984 1505 521
Americas 1069 409 267
Other users 0 50 70
Total Worldwide 8229 2950 1470
Penetration of IPTV for selected operators,
Operator BB subs IPTV subs IPTV % BB subs IPTV as %BB
operator country
Belgacom 1,538,284 191,348 12.4 2,484,784 7.7
Chunghwa 4,166,000 333,000 8.0 4,566,000 7.3
MTS 158,549 70,984 44.8 8,176,555 0.9
Orange 6,575,000 837,000 12.7 14,270,600 5.9
PCCW 1,176,000 818,000 69.6 1,962,624 41.7
Telefonica 4,728,900 450,900 9.5 7,464,972 6.0
PCCW has over 41% of its broadband customers taking IPTV over the same line, which is far higher than any other global operator.
DSL continues to dominate broadband growth and DSL remains the most popular access technology, with over 200 million of the world’s 313 million broadband subscribers connecting via DSL. The global market share of broadband technologies remains largely unchanged from December 2006, with almost 22 per cent of subscribers using cable, and just over 10% using FTTx.
Western Europe has the most broadband users, with 72 million of the 86 million broadband subscribers using DSL. The Eastern Europe DSL market, while small (less than 14 million), is the region with the strongest growth (over 60% in the 12 months to 30 June 2007). The USA has the most broadband subscribers in one country (over 63 million), but China tops the DSL subscriber list with over 44 million of its 59 million broadband users connected via DSL.