It turns out that Vodafone in Portugal, which announced that it was building an IPTV system in July, is not following its German counterpart, but has instead invested in Microsoft Mediaroom middleware, which means that it owes almost nothing to the system installed at Arcor in Germany.
We should have known, because Vodafone around Europe operates almost as if it were five or six separate companies and rarely reaches a consensus on how to go about anything except its core cellular technology.
The detail came up in a discussion with Mediaroom this week, when the Microsoft IPTV arm pointed out that it had a larger share of the top ten European incumbent IPTV installations than we had credited it with in last week’s issue.
Back in July, when Vodafone Portugal had made a very terse launched announcement short on all installation details, we said it was likely that the Arcor installation ‘ built around Alcatel’s old OMP middleware, the NDS conditional access system, Harmonic encoders and set tops and home gateways from Pirelli ‘ had been used as a blueprint for all of Vodafone’s IPTV experiments in Europe.
Vodafone Portugal launched Casa TV, with 100 channels, including all the leading free to air channels (RTP and SIC channels, TVI and Porto Canal) as well as the favourite premium channels in Portugal. And Vodafone says it will offer place shifting from the set top to key Vodafone handsets, as well as remotely viewing the TV Guide on a phones, getting program alerts and being able to control the DVR to schedule recordings from their phone ‘ all features it developed in Germany. Which is why we made the false assumption that the system was based on the same technology.
Now it transpires that although we think that Alcatel Lucent was the prime contractor in both installations, in the Portugal deal it bid Mediaroom and that would imply a whole different approach, with different suppliers from the German system. To date Vodafone Germany has not felt it worthwhile to divulge subscriber numbers for its Arcor installations, but at conferences has talked in terms of 100,000 plus sign ups, but it transpired that this was for a free trial. Right now, as one of Mediaroom’s other customers, Deutsche Telekom is running rampant in Germany, with over 273% additions during the past 12 months, perhaps Arcor found that it was up against a better system and advised Portugal to sign with Deutsche’s supplier.
The other detail Mediaroom wanted to take issue with that the fact that Portugal Telecom is also one of its installations.
So Mediaroom now has a stranglehold in IPTV installs in Portugal with the exception of France Telecom controlled telco Sonaecom, which offers its Clix SmarTV service, the first in the world to rely on the Cisco VQE (Visual Quality Experience) technology.
As far as Vodafone is concerned this has implications for it going forwards. It has acquired major ISP lines in Italy and Spain (acquired from Tele2) and now (see separate story) in Ireland, and has a wholesale deal with British Telecom in the UK. It may choose to take the Vodafone Portugal system as a blue print for each of these territories, giving a huge European upside to Mediaroom and its hardware partners. Just as likely it may leave each of these territories to make up their own mind if and when they enter the IPTV business and how they go about it, and end up with a European wide hodgepodge of systems, something it is ruing over its cavalier approach to billing systems.
Vodafone’s French operation is minority owned with Vivendi and may go in yet another direction since Vodafone does not enjoy control there.
We’ve always said that Vodafone should have bought Tiscali UK when it had the chance, instead of letting Carphone Warehouse pick it up for a song, earlier this year. But that would have given Vodafone yet another IPTV service, using different software and hardware, so perhaps that’s just as well.
Going back to those Mediaroom installations, the revised numbers in the table above show that out of the top ten incumbent European telcos Mediaroom has 4 IPTV customers (it has more outside the incumbents and additionally Denmark’s TDC and a number of central European incumbents with Deutche Telekom ownership). Between them these four represent around 28% of the installed IPTV households at incumbents among the top ten European countries, but its operators are growing at an aggregate of 200% per annum (though far slower during the last quarter more like 47%), with no Mediaroom operator growing its customer base last year less than 100%. By comparison the entire ten are growing at just 76% and if you take out the Mediaroom customers, at just 52%.