It has been a year since any analyst group has had the nerve to actually predict IPTV service growth, and there’s good reasons for that ‘ it’s a lottery right now. Part of the problem of course is that predicting anything in a recession is tough, and that many things can influence IPTV growth ‘ if build out spend is slowed by incumbents, that will slow it down every bit as much as consumer spending falls.
There is also the small problem that no reports are selling in the current recession, so analysis groups are laying off staff and waiting it out.
We had one attempt 6 months back from Infonetics Research, but that fell at the first hurdle by including it with various aspects of cable, which were shrinking, and came up with the shock conclusion that IPTV growth was in the past.
Now US home networking specialist Parks has had a stab at the problem, and reckons that the right number for global IPTV services is 20 million for 2008 and is confidently pointing at 40 million by year end.
Parks also makes the point that this has implications for ‘guess where?’ its own specialist area, home networks, saying that a telco’s most compelling offering comes when IPTV is bundled with converged applications, home networking, and value-added features.
We can’t see any telco that is not already in home networking or which doesn’t already supply value added services, suddenly investing in them right now, so the advice will fly right over everyone’s heads, but first let’s focus on the prediction.
When we did our own review of first quarter numbers (second quarter are due this week for companies like AT&T) it showed that growth was all over the place ‘ with Deutsche in Germany experiencing decent growth and expecting 100% growth in 2009 from 500,000 to 1 million.
France held the lead of any given country with 5.6 million IPTV homes but that was last measured at end of September 2008, but for the prior 12 months it showed 1.6 million new IPTV customers added, around 39% growth for the whole year. But then again in France IPTV penetration is already 34.6% out of the country’s 16.2 million ADSL lines, so it can’t keep going at that pace.
Meanwhile in China we had reports at the end of last year that IPTV at China Telecom had reached 1.5 million homes installed and was going at a rate of 500,000 every 6 months. So clearly no-one told China there was a recession on and a few more 6 month periods like that will see China overtake the US.
But then we get contradictory evidence, for instance when chip maker Sigma fell foul of the economy, blaming the shipments of IPTV set top chips, that were dramatically down.
According to Parks the graph below sums up this year at least, and we’re not going to argue. It is well behind the numbers that people were predicting a year to 18 months ago, but in some countries there has definitely been a recessionary blip, caused mostly by caution among telcos, not by consumer trends, and perhaps that is now behind us, or about to be behind us, something which should show in the coming quarter’s figures over the next few weeks.