The Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) has just had a survey which tried to establish beyond a doubt that its technology was required in Europe ‘ only the result is pretty inconclusive and seems to say ignore some of the richer parts of Europe and head for Poland.
Despite results showing that there are at best an average of two coaxial outlets per home across the four surveyed countries ‘ the UK, France, Netherlands and Poland, MoCA has concluded that there is a significant addressable market for coaxial cable-based home networking in these countries.
The results from the UK and France were very similar, with 56% and 55%, respectively having two or more coaxial outlets in their home, while more than a quarter of respondents in both countries having three or more.
We worry about this conclusion. In the US 100 million homes have coaxial cabling (90% of homes) and most have pay-TV subscribers with multiple set-top boxes. In Europe pay TV penetration is far lower and for non-pay TV homes, coaxial cable exists mostly to take a signal off a rooftop antenna and bring it to one or more TV sets in the home.
In Poland there has been a long term reliance on analog cable, which is being slowly upgraded to digital and it also has a new love affair with DTH digital satellite which has seen a massive uptake of late, so that each have around 33% of Polish TV homes. Of course digital satellite feeds can just as easily use MoCA for empowering a second TV set from the set top, as cable can.
Which is why we weren’t surprised when Poland had the best results, with 71% of respondents having two or more coaxial outlets and 36% cent having three or more. The Netherlands recorded the lowest number of coaxial outlets per household with 45 per cent having two or more and 15 per cent having three or more. This is perhaps because of the slow upgrade to digital cable that seems to have taken forever among its two top cable companies and the recent uptake of DVB-T services there.
‘The picture we get in these particular countries is that there is a higher occurrence of outlets per home than presumed, and that consumers are willing to add extra coax drops as needed to take advantage of the inherent advantages provided by this medium, and not available to wireless or power line-based alternatives,’ said Stephen Froehlich, Senior Analyst, Consumer Electronics at IMS Research, who oversaw the research.
MoCA technology is designed specifically for coaxial cabling and it chose these fours countries because it wanted a broad cross section of European countries, which have very different TV backgrounds.
The service was conducted between Feb 11 and Feb 22 with 384 respondents per country
IMS was surprised by the results. Despite 71% cable penetration in the Netherlands, the number of outlets is relatively low, with only 45% of homes having 2 or more
In all countries except Netherlands, number of TVs, set-tops, or DVRs significantly correlated to number of coaxial outlets. The natural conclusion from these correlations is that the coaxial outlets are added as more TVs are determined to be ‘needed’ by a household, the company said. Well yes, except where DVB-T is in the process of being added, as it is in Poland, which will slow down the uptake of pay TV, we suspect or even send it backwards.