All the major telcos in Europe took major steps forward in the provision of IPTV customers, with Deutsche Telekom perhaps the most impressive after complaints that initially its service was late and over priced. It has jumped to 200,000 IPTV customers this quarter for its T-Home Entertain service up from 116,000 at the end of last year, a gain of 84,000 in the quarter. It now says that it can reach 500,000 homes by year end. Deutsche Telekom has around 14 million broadband lines.
BT also did well, with a leap to 214,000 customers up from just 120,000 at the end of 2007 for its BT Vision hybrid DVB-T VoD service.
Spain’s Telefoncia put another 43,000 IPTV subscribers on during its first quarter , accelerating slightly over the 35,591 it put on in the first quarter last year taking its customer base 554,045.
In all pay TV at Telefonica rose to exceed 1.8 million, but that figure included operations up and running in Spain, the Czech Republic, Peru, Chile, Colombia and Brazil, some of them as DTH satellite delivery, not all IPTV.
Finally Orange said that its TV offerings will not cover more than 98% of French households from July onwards as it has extended its domestic triple play from just being broadband based and reaching just 50% of French homes, to including a satellite option through Eutelsat, in a system set up by France Telecom subsidiary Globecast.
Orange rose its Broadband TV customer base to 1.41 million subscribers by the end of March 2008 (which we reported last week) up from 770,000.