The latest game of ‘count the IPTV’ subscriptions has begun in the second quarter with Belgacom adding another 86,141 IPTV subscribers in Europe this quarter to reach 391,460 total subscribers, having been selling for the past three years exactly. Belgacom said that its average revenue per user has risen to €17.5 per month
KPN in the Netherlands confusingly reported that it had reached 636,000 pay TV customers, up 299,000 since this time last year, but it splits these between IPTV and its new offerings in digital terrestrial, using DVB-T, although it charges for both, effectively overtaking Belgium’s Belgacom in numbers.
Last week AT&T reported that its U-verse TV subscribers rose by 170,000 in the quarter to 549,000, on target to hit its predicted 1 million by the end of 2008. This means that it has all but caught up with the uptake rate of Verizon with its FiOS fiber to the home cable style TV service, which rose by just 176,000 during the quarter and just 187,000 net new FiOS Internet customers. This takes the Verizon total to around 1.4 million FiOS TV customers a lead of 850,000 overt AT&T, but it doesn’t look like it will continue to increase that lead.
Verizon also reported that it has gained final approval for the New York City video franchise, and is announcing FiOS TV available now with 100 HD channels in the New York metropolitan area. The New York City franchise covers 3 million premises, and Verizon already passes about 25% of these with fiber.
Elsewhere in Europe only BT and TeliaSonera has reported IPTV numbers, with the former’s BT Vision reaching 214,000 UK homes up 94,000 during the quarter and TeliaSonera in Scandinavia saying that TV customers rose to 816,000, with 430,000 of those coming as IPTV subscriptions. Most of these are in Sweden, which reached 320,000, more than doubling, up 162,000 from the year ago figure of 158,000.
However this was an orchestrated push, which it is now taking outside of Sweden. IPTV subscriptions in Sweden only increased by 2,000 during he past quarter. TeliaSonera now has 110,000 IPTV customers outside of Sweden, up around double over a year ago (we reckon) in countries including Finland, Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
Other Major European pay TV efforts expected to report during the next two weeks include all the major French IPTV and cable suppliers, Telecom Italia, Liberty Global, Virgin Media and Sky in the UK, Teleonica in Spain, Fastweb in Italy, Deutsche Telekom in Germany an all the major Germany cable TV operations and Premiere, as well as Tiscali in the UK and Italy, but so far the impression seems to be a continued head of steam for IPTV, over cable.