British Telecom in the UK revealed in its quarterly numbers just how little take up there has been for its BT Vision IPTV hybrid service, at just 60,000 customers. At that run rate, around 5,000 new customers a month, it will fall far short of its planned 3 million customers, and take decades to reach that number. However BT hardly installed any customers in the first 9 months of the service being available, and failed entirely to advertise its existence, and insists that its run rate is far more rapid now, passing 5,000 a week.
BT said that further growth will come by adding a self install option that has just been launched. Previously customers had to pay for a BT engineer visit.
Apparently 30,000 customers are waiting for their BT Vision engineer visit, so the number of homes could rise to 100,000 by the end of 2007, however insiders have told us in the past that if BT doesn’t reach 200,000 by the end of the year, it may kill the project.
BT uses the Microsoft Mediaroom software to deliver low priced VoD, through a home gateway that also accepts DVB-T signals from the UK’s 64 channel Freeview service.
At the launch last year the numbers appeared to us not to add up, and that was when BT said it would have 200,000 customers by the end of 2007, and Faultline predicted that it would have limited customer acceptance. The ideas behind BT Vision were set up over 15 years ago, in trials that ran across DSL broadband lines which used board level line cards. The broadband industry and IPTV in general, has moved on rapidly from those days and yet the BT vision has failed to keep pace, and opted to be one of the only such hybrid systems in Europe that did not use a full IPTV multicast. BT’s network was thought to require substantial investment to offer a nationwide multicast, but BT is in the middle of a project to shift entirely to the IP protocol from end to end, called the 21st Century Network, and felt that this was more important.
Getting back to those BT figures, revenue rose 3% to £5.1 billion in the quarter, and it breaks out a number of revenues that it refers to as new wave revenue, and says that growth came from there ‘ broadband, networked IT services ‘ and these brought in a record 38% of revenues. Earnings before income tax depreciation and amortization were up a few percent.
BT says it is on the way to becoming a global leader in networked IT services, with BT Global Services securing contract wins of £1.6 billion in the second quarter, with £9.2 billion achieved over the last twelve months.
BT had 11.7 million wholesale broadband connections, including 3.2 million local loop unbundled lines, with 479,000 connections added in the second quarter. BT delivered net additions of its own of 178,000, around 37% of the total, through its BT Retail arm, taking its direct sales broadband customers to 4 million.
Revenue from BT’s traditional voice businesses declined by 1% compared to a decline of 4% last year, achieved through robust marketing defense the company said, and the 12 month rolling average revenue per consumer household went up by £5 ($10) during the quarter to £271 ($540), the seventh consecutive quarter of growth.
BT said it will launch next generation broadband services, offering users broadband speeds up to 24 Mbps during 2008 with end user trials already begun. And BT has rolled out its 21CN globally and it is now available in 130 countries round the world.