U.S. IPTV subscriptions reach 600,000
Jan 16, 2007 8:00 AM
The start of a new year seems like the right time to take stock of where the IPTV market stands and is likely to go.
IPTV Update spoke with Bob Larribeau, principal analyst and founder of TelecomView and an analyst with Multimedia Research Group (MRG), to discuss his recent forecasts and assessment of the IPTV market.
Last fall, Larribeau authored "IPTV Global Forecast: 2006 to 2010" for MRG.
IPTV Update: Your "IPTV Global Forecast: 2006 to 2010" report released last fall identified small independent IPTV providers as driving much of the IPTV growth in North America, as opposed to Europe and Asia where large telcos are mainly responsible. What are the major reasons for the drive by small independents?
Bob Larribeau: The small independent telcos have pioneered IPTV globally. They started first, so they developed a lead. Their small scale does work in their favor as does their commitment to providing advanced services to a largely rural population. The government loans and funding that support them have enabled them to do this.
IPTVU: How do your findings square with Verizon's FiOS rollout and AT&T's U-verse launch?
BL: FiOS did much better than we forecast and AT&T did worse. FiOS has done quite well at signing up FiOS and FiOS TV subscribers. On the other hand, AT&T is behind. It missed its FTTN deployment target for 2006 by 20 percent. Its U-Verse introduction has been quite tentative. AT&T still seems to be in beta test mode rather than offering a fully scalable service.
IPTVU: The report identifies the IPTV sector not experiencing growth as being operators who have selected Microsoft software. Has that changed since fall in light of certain recent rollouts in Europe, such as Deutsche Telekom?
BL: Rollouts have started at AT&T, Deutsche Telekom and Swisscom since the report was released. There are reports that Swisscom now has 20,000 IPTV subscribers. This is good progress. There have been no announcements from AT&T or Deutsche Telekom, but I do not expect that their numbers will be very high.
When I did the forecast I went through a fairly arithmetical process of working with the spreadsheet, and I started plugging in numbers and looking at it. What I noticed was the results I was seeing for service providers around the world were at or exceeding the previous forecast and previous expectations. So, everything was going along nicely on the path we were forecasting.
The exception was the Microsoft accounts, and that had a big effect on Deutsche Telekom and also on AT&T and Bell South in the U.S. In Europe, the market was blank enough that the European market was still ahead of where I expected it to be based on results from other service providers.
North America was behind and I did not have solid information at that time about FiOS, and what Verizon was doing with FiOS, so I was pretty conservative with those numbers. So, I ended up dropping the North American numbers from the previous forecasts quite significantly. Just looking at that, it was obvious that the whole market was doing great except for the Microsoft accounts.
That was a first conclusion, and the more I worked on it, the more that conclusion held up. I had three discussions with Microsoft about it and they didn't dispute my facts. They maybe disputed my forecasts, but they didn't dispute any of the facts in my forecast.
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