Report: IPTV Gaining Lead in Broadband Subscriber Base

A new study by InfoCom has revealed that IPTV (News - Alert) is slowly taking over new subscribers in the Pay-TV market. More customers in large broadband subscriber bases are showing increased interests in IPTV service.

 

InfoCom is a market research and consultancy company that provides strategic analyses and planning assistance to stakeholders in the telecommunications, IT and multimedia industries.

 

The company has stated that they release their ‘Quarterly Television Monitoring Service’ to list relevant players and their strategic overview of IPTV subscribers and offer a synthetic and detailed insight of strategic positioning of carrier and by country with market shares in the single TV market.

 

In its newly released report InfoCom states that the advent of IPTV is not equally spread. For instance in the UK even with a higher number of broadband users IPTV is finding it hard to get its share of subscribers as they find the already available satellite and Freeview’s strong market more advantageous there. Similarly European service providers in Italy, Spain and Germany are seeing sluggish IPTV growth even as their markets have seen early commercialization of IPTV.

 

On the contrary, France is seeing higher IPTV additions. France Telecom (News - Alert) is attracting more than 1.5m IPTV customers in 1H08 — more than 90% of which are from its domestic market and the rest, from subsidiaries in Spain and Poland. The study also mentions that France Telecom kept its top position from end-2007 to 1H08 and largest IPTV provider.

 

InfoCom officials say that the TV Quarterly Monitoring is currently available on a yearly subscription basis. It provides a large amount of indicators — among which market TV watcher broken down by CaTV, satellite, IPTV and terrestrial; DSL, cable modem and FTTx subscribers; all figures broken down by carrier — for a large number of countries with forecasts until 2013.

 

The report also mentions that Chinese service providers could manage to double their IPTV subscriber numbers, the highest increase among all areas. The report suggests that the Beijing Olympics are likely to have played a significant role in the accelerated growth of IPTV subscriptions in this region.