iPTV, the numbers game
The UK IPTV customer numbers just don’t add up at the moment, but everyone is being very optimistic for the UK, European and Global take-up. Loads of people have jumped on the BT-bashing bandwagon to say that they are behind target with numbers of customers recruited onto their broadband TV service BT Vision. BT is claiming it is ahead of schedule in acquisitions, many observers are keen to interpret the numbers differently. Nonetheless some ambitious forecasts are being touted by BT and others for the next three to five years.
BT Vision says that its public target is still 100,000 customers by the end of 2007 and it is actually ahead of schedule. In fact they say they have already signed up 100,000 customers, although according to the most recent figures it has only 70,000 installations. So it would seem there is quite a lag between signing them up and setting up the service for them. they also say they are adding over 5,000 customers a week, so 100,000 by the end of the year looks possible. In previous statements BT said it would have be “initially connecting thousands of customers then hundreds of thousands by the end of 2007″.
Despite all this confusion BT Vision has re-iterated its target of 2-3 million customers in the medium term, which it defines as “3-5 years from December 2006″. So that is at least 2 million customers by the end of 2011, a big challenge at over nine thousand net new customers a week for four years. To achieve three million customers in the next two years would require over 27,000 new customers a week. That does not take into account customer churn, which is likely to see at least 10% of these customers leaving every year.
Meanwhile, Tiscali TV who acquired the Video Networks Homechoice service in August 2006 for £100 million reported having only 36,000 customers at the end of October 2007, despite extending its network to be able to reach over five million homes in the UK. Tiscali has been migrating customers onto its own local loop unbundled network. The company says it is registering 250 new activations per day. The number of television customers still remains a small fraction of its broadband customer base, which now stands at over two million. The baffling thing is that Homechoice reported 45,000 customers before the change of ownership.
But to keep the theme of optimism, research company MRG has substantially uplifted their global forecast of IPTV subscribers, up from 63.6 million to 72.6 million in 2011. Apparently, this reflects their view of big opportunities for America, China, India and Korea to catch up with Europe. Len Feldman, director of IPTV analysis at MRG says “Europe will remain the number one IPTV market in terms of subscriber count through 2011, but Asia is catching up quickly and will most likely surpass Europe in 2012-2013,” he added. “In North America, Verizon and AT&T are growing considerably faster than we previously forecasted, and we expect Verizon to be the world’s largest IPTV service provider in 2011.”
