554k IPTV subscribers as of end 1Q08. Added 43k subscribers during 1Q08

IPTV penetration rate is 11.46% of the broadband subscribers

Telefonica also has over 1.2 million pay TV subscribers in Latin America. Majority are non-IPTV subscribers. In Czech Repulic I think all the 87k pay TV subs are on IPTV

• Telecom Italia ended 1Q08 with 136k IPTV subscribers, an increase of 56 thousand in the quarter.
• 1.5 million VoIP subscribers as of end 1Q08, which represents 23% penetration into retail broadband access lines.

154k IPTV subscribers as of end 1Q08

Added 38,000 IPTV subscribers in 1Q08

Deutsche Telekom had dropped the price of its starter package by 17 percent in March 2008

Telco to invest in improved customer support for IPTV

VSDL roll out in 50 cities continues

United Telecom, a Bangalore based telecom company contracted by the Indian authorities to build out an advanced broadband network in the tourist hub state of Goa, will be offering triple play services in the state including IPTV. UTStarcom won the equipment contract that includes VoIP, IPTV, and GEPON gear - the whole lot.

United Telecom is itself a vendor supplying optical networking components to service providers like BSNL. And although Reliance and BSNL have already laid out broadband networks in Goa, United Telecom’s footprint is all fiber. In fact it has already laid out majority of the FTTH network in the state.

Continue reading "United Telecom to bring IPTV-over-Fiber to Goa" »

AT&T: 379k IPTV subscribers, up 148k from previous quarter. Addressable market 9 million homes

Verizon: 1.2 million IPTV subscribers, up 263k from previous quarter. Addressable market 82% of 7.9 million homes passed

• 4.65 million VoBB subscribers in France as of end 1Q08. Added 547k subscribers during 1Q08

• 722k VoBB customers outside France. Poland: 164k VoIP subscribers, other European countries 558k

•VoIP represented 61% of the number of ADSL subscribers and IPTV represented 17%

Continue reading "France Telecom 1Q08 VoIP and IPTV Update" »

To my knowledge, there is no such thing out there yet. But there will be. A couple of companies are doing it at the client level (for Web TV) but the only source I came across that is doing it at server side middleware level is this thing called Toroid. There are not many details on the site.

There are several Internet TV companies coming up all over the world. I am sure they would want to get their hands on something like this. An Open Source IPTV middleware will help evolve and scale online video/TV to new heights.

There are a few drivers for Open Source IPTV middleware already. Several service providers are unhappy about the integration problems they face in putting together various IPTV components. Open Source will only compound those problems initially but those IPTV vendors looking to sell to Internet TV (as opposed to telco centric IPTV) companies will put interfaces into such a system. IPTV service providers are usually stuck with a small number of ecosystems that come pre-integrated with other IPTV network elements such as VoD servers and Encoders etc.

Continue reading "Open Source IPTV middleware" »

• 435k IPTV subscribers. Net additions during the quarter: 41k. Number of subscribers increased 10% q-o-q

• “1.3% Local revenue decrease and the 4.4% Domestic Long Distance revenue decrease, mainly due to mobile and VoIP substitution”.

• 4.28m broadband subscribers (including ADSL and FTTB) at the end of the 1Q08. 3.6m ADSL subscribers, 634.5 thousand FTTX subscribers, which is up 97.7 thousand in the quarter.

• TeliaSonera ended 1Q08 with 407 thousand IPTV subscribers.

• Added 28,000 new IPTV subscribers in 1Q08.

• Country by country results include:
o Sweden ended with 318 thousand IPTV subscribers, an increase of 14 thousand in 1Q08.
o Norway ended with 4 thousand IPTV subscribers, an increase of 2 thousand in 1Q08.
o Lithuania ended with 25 thousand IPTV subscribers, an increase of 7 thousand in 1Q08.
o Estonia ended with 60 thousand IPTV subscribers, an increase of 6 thousand in 1Q08.
o TeliaSonera has no IPTV subscribers in Finland or Denmark.

Continue reading "TeliaSonera 1Q08 IPTV Update" »

BSNL lost a massive 4.4 million landlines during 2007-08 according to the latest figures released. With an annual ARPU of $63 (Rs 2,500) that means a loss of $277 million in terms of revenues. Losses are due to several reasons. But we all know the main culprit is migration over to mobile subscription.

One of the ways to arrest that reduction in lines is IPTV, which BSNL was supposed to be heavily investing in. But I doubt that will help much. At the moment there are 3.13 million broadband users out of a modest total of 38 million landline connections, which means less than 10% of the landline users. Potential IPTV customers in India are just those 3.13 million broadband users. Actually not ... because of this user base around 60% must be enterprise users. So the net IPTV addressable market right now boils down to 1.25 million subscribers.

Continue reading "Can BSNL stop the landline landslide through IPTV?" »

Telcos looking to secure their long term prospects have no choice but to invest in triple play. The voice and the data services are available from all. IPTV however is not yet widely implemented by telcos.

Those telcos who are planning to offer IPTV are upgrading their broadband infrastructure to support speeds of 8mbps and above. But by doing so they are enabling Over-The-Top TV or the Internet TV, which is being positioned as the biggest competitor to IPTV right now. Although I have come across speeds as low as 250kbps as requirements for streaming video, but the typical sort of throughput you require is in the region of 500kbps.

Continue reading "The Need For Speed Dilemma" »

This writeup on Variety suggests that Korea Telecom has 550,000 IPTV subscribers. That means there must be a lot more Over-The-Top IPTV subscribers in the two countries than what I have estimated on last week's post.

So I guess collectively between Hanaro, Korea Telecom, and someone like USEN in Japan, the OTT IPTV subscriber base must be between 1.6m to 1.8m in the two countries. Of course the reason we bundle the two for OTT IPTV is because in both countries IPTV providers are not yet allowed to offer live TV.

Within a triple play bundle, the actual IPTV usage may be limited. If IPTV is relegated to a secondary TV service, what implications does that have for the industry?

The telecommunications market is very price sensitive and subscribers generally migrate to the operator who can give them best value for their spend. Service providers have realized they can increase subscriber stickiness with bundles. In some cases, their bundles are on such favourable terms that a household ends up with 2 TV services. The reality, though, is that as the introductory bundle pricing expires, customers are likely to settle for a single service. In the long term, the economics have to work both ways – the consumer will migrate to the best value and the operator has to offer profitable services. The consumer may end up with a combination of IP-only or IP plus cable or terrestrial. From their perspective, the delivery infrastructure is less a concern than the level of service and the richness of the TV service.

With consumers in France getting IPTV from the likes of Free and Neuf, there is no way of knowing how many are actually using the service. In the UK, BT customers do not rely on its IPTV service as their main TV source. This is something additional on top of the Sky service they have. A bit like using VoIP as a secondary line.

From what we’re seeing, this is likely geography specific. For example, the UK has a Freeview service which has about 3 to 4 million subscribers. It is a terrestrial service which you do not find in, say, North America because North America relies on cable as the distribution network of choice. Freeview provides around 50 digital channels. BT is piggybacking on Freeview for linear TV and they are using IPTV for on-demand TV. In this case, these services co-exist since the TV economics in the UK allow this.

Continue reading "Interview with Jaison Dolvane, CEO, Espial" »

We are rather late on the 4Q07 update. So I will keep it very brief. IPTV Set-Top boxes are the main revenue generators in IPTV equipment segment. 1.8 million IP STBs shipped in 4Q07 generated an estimated $202 million in revenues. Motorola leads. Other significant market leaders were Amino and Sagem.

IP STB generates more than the combined revenues of IPTV middleware-security-encoder-vod, all put together. So if you have connections in Taiwan and China, that is where most of the STB manufacturing action is talking place.

If the authorities remove restriction on live broadcasting, IPTV providers Hanaro Telecom and Korea Telecom plan to purchase $200 million worth of IP STBs together with LG Dacom in 2008. The deregulation to this effect is expected sometime in May this year.

The overall investment amount for IPTV is a whopping $15 billion that includes $10 billion for overall network upgrades and IPTV equipment purchases of about $350 million. IP STB is obviously biggest piece in the equipment purchase. The commitment by the companies to invest may speed up the expected deregulation which allows the IPTV providers to offer all types of broadcast content including live TV.

There is a somewhat similar regulation in Japan where IPTV providers (unless they are cable TV licensees as well) are not allowed to offer live TV. As in Korea, these Japanese providers are offering Over-The-Top TV (OTT TV). OTT in Korea and Japan have a collective subscriber base of over 1 million.

Electronic Programming Guides on TV are still living in the 20th century. They are not user friendly at all. Most of them look like interfaces for writing assembly level programming code. I think EPGs should be intelligent enough to suggest to the viewer what to watch based on the viewer’s viewing habits/preferences. If as a first generation proactive EPG, I had an integrated utility that gives me my usage statistics, I could use it for several things:

Continue reading "Utility generating TV usage stats" »

• 1.3 million VoIP/Broadband customers
• 740k IPTV subscribers, up 73% y-o-y
• Fastweb’s network has been extended to cover 11.4 million households or 50% of Italian population

• 70K IPTV subscribers
• Added 10K new subs during 4Q07 compared to 20K in 3Q07

• 379,000 IPTV subscribers, of which 304,000 are in sweden
• Added 103,000 new IPTV subs in 4Q07 (88,000 in Sweden)

There are over 20 IPTV middleware vendors generating meaningful traction. Keeping in view the growth prospects of overall IPTV equipment market over the next few quarters, this segment is likely to see some consolidation during 2008. Orca acquisition is a start to a wider vendor consolidation across IPTV equipment industry expected this year.

Encoder space is perhaps the most consolidated segment in IPTV market. There are around 6 major players left in that market now. Hardware oriented platforms usually commoditize faster and hence consolidate earlier. IPTV middleware is a software product.

Continue reading "IPTV vendor consolidation in 2008" »

COTS hardware has been around for more than a decade. What is keeping equipment makers from deploying these solutions?

A suitable COTS architecture has only been available for two years. Other COTS architectures like Compact PCI were basically enterprise technology. So COTS suitable for core telecom applications that can support five nines did not exist until ATCA availability. And ATCA availability goes back a couple of years.

I do see ATCA growing to be a multi-billion dollar business, but, as with all things in telecom, it will take time. The biggest complexity has not been about ATCA itself. It is about porting applications over to ATCA and, in particular, making a move to Linux. So moving to ATCA hardware is quite easy to do, but a lot of legacy applications simultaneously moving to ATCA are also moving from proprietary, 20-year–old, home-grown OSes to Linux.

One of the biggest motivations for using COTS hardware is the time-to-market factor. How far have vendors been able to achieve that in practice?

We have customers, who, using ATCA, have brought applications to market in under 12 months versus classic 24-to-36 month development period. We have a customer in Asia that chose our ATCA platform in Spring 2007 and, before the end of 2007, had live service up and running for a wireless application.

Can you perhaps name some of the application categorises that are being enabled by COTS hardware such as ATCA? How would you generalise the type of applications being ported over to ATCA platform?

ATCA will be the hardware of choice for a wide spectrum of applications. Over the last few years we have seen particular strength in the wireless arena: media gateway, RNC, SBC, and IMS applications like media server. IPTV has also been a very good adopter of using ATCA. From the fixed network side, we are seeing elements like access consolidator and echo cancellation as prime candidates.

Continue reading "Interview with Scott Grout, CEO, RadiSys" »

Other than the integration issues that IPTV operators often stumble upon, being able to differentiate their service is a major challenge. IPTV is in its infancy and it has to work much harder to shake the equilibrium in the pay-TV services market dominated by the traditional broadcast mechanisms, the cable and satellite. So far IPTV has not been able to offer anything new to the end users who are essentially technology agnostic. They want a TV service. And wherefrom that comes, hardly matters.

All the IPTV deployments are in early stages and the operators are keeping the services simple. Another issue is, though we can potentially have very innovative and differentiated services over IPTV, the operators are only willing to offer such services once they reach a certain scale. This critical scale is supposed to be around 5 million subscribers market. Even France Telecom, the largest IPTV provider is far behind this number at the moment.

Continue reading "IPTV: where is the service differentiation?" »

• 3.2 million residential broadband customers. Same number of VoIP subscribers in theory
• 750K IPTV subscribers, up from 600k at the end of June 2007
• In business VoIP, 40% of new data link customers take up VoIP
• 300k mobile customers which includes a small proportion of WiFi-GSM subscribers

What value does your product Accedo Application Provisioning Solution add to an IPTV installation?

Our product enables an operator to distribute value added applications in a cost efficient way to any STB. We have integrated it with all the leading STB manufacturers and many middleware platforms.

What kind of value added applications are IPTV service providers deploying?

Value added services are largely confined to gaming in IPTV deployments. Within that we see multiuser games in demand. With the traditional broadcast networks it was not possible to have multiuser capability. Over the IPTV it can be done easily.

How has the gaming and related applications bit done so far in the IPTV segment?

After the movies, gaming is the most interesting application for end consumers. We normally get 20-25% of subscriber base that play games on a monthly basis. It’s a very very high usage of casual gaming on the TV. TV is created for light entertainment. People like to play games like Suduko, Poker, etc. while waiting for their favorite programme to start.

Continue reading "Interview with Michael Lantz, CEO, Accedo Broadband" »

If we are to believe in the upcoming applications renaissance, then we have not seen anything yet. New Web 2.0 / Voice 2.0 applications will keep coming every day. And while I have tested over a hundred so far, I am not going to test one every week, let alone one every day. One of the reasons is that for a lot of these services there is a downloadable. As such I have to go through the ritual of downloading and installing and testing and uninstalling (if I decide not to keep the application).

There has got to be a more efficient method of testing these new services. Perhaps a site that hosts a test account where feasible. The developers could work directly with the site owner to arrange a test account (or several such accounts). People like me would certainly want to use such sites rather than download-and-install things all the time.

Continue reading "Hosted test bed for applications involving downloads" »

Which markets are you finding more traction for IPTV these days?

IPTV is picking up in Asia and Eastern Europe. It is not doing so well Western Europe and North America. The only major player in North America is AT&T.

Within Asia what has been your experience in markets such as India, Japan and China?

China and Japan are 2 different markets. In Japan it is all about HD. In China we see 50-100 channels kind of set up and that is nearly all SD. We do not see HD in China yet. Another aspect about China is that some of the operators are not using middleware. Subscribers go up and down the channels on the remote control. Some of the deployments I have there are live TV channels. There is little conditional access and in most cases no video-on-demand. I am not aware of any installation in China that uses VOD.

Moving over to India there was a lot of noise recently from players like BSNL, MTNL and Bharti Airtel.

BSNL’s IPTV will be based on our solution. In fact all but Reliance are using our solution. Bharti has not started the service yet. In India the lowest number of channels you start with is 150. But it is mostly SD.

What will be the single biggest trend during 2008 in IPTV?

The main trend we are likely to see is the popularity of Internet TV. This is a major competition for IPTV providers going forward. Internet TV is especially gaining popularity in the US. If you log into the websites of content owners such as Fox you see good quality videos that you can download.

Continue reading "Interview with Yosi Aloni, President, Optibase" »

• Estimated 1.9 million VoIP subscribers at the end of 4Q07.
• 21CN update: More than 35% of UK core network already rebuilt,
• Wholesale Broadband Connect, ADSL2+ rollout from Spring 2008 with speeds of up to 24Mb available.
• During the quarter the number of IPTV subscribers more than doubled to 120k. Latest Feb figures released: 150k subscribers.
• Stopped marketing BT Fusion, the incumbent’s FMC services that had signed up under 50k subscribers.

I have not come across a lot of companies with an ASP model that are offering VoIP as well as IPTV.

That is right. We are trying to unify three services into one, which include communications, information, and entertainment. We have designed our IPTV services to incorporate social networking from day one. We enable real-time opinions and real-time ratings and multiple ways to communicate around the content.

You don’t own the last mile. So how can you reliably offer IPTV with all the QoS issues?

Our technology accommodates for a great deal of latency. We are also very light on the bandwidth consumption for IPTV delivery. Most services out there require 500 to 600 kbps kind of bi-directional connection. We don’t need that kind of bandwidth. We operate in about 280kbps kind of range.

You have over a million users. How does that subscriber base break down by the application subscription or usage?

We have near about 3 million users now. I would say that over 80% of our subscribers use the communications side which includes IM and VoIP. The IPTV side and Video-on-Demand is utilized by about 60% of the subscribers. There is obviously an overlap.

Continue reading "Interview with Greg Parker, CEO, Raketu" »

I think this would be another way to encourage local content. If you help monetize the local video content, you might have a few potential producers out there. Among various forms, local video content could take form of video interviews you do with various members of the community, something like a local community news magazine on TV. In terms of the platform that hosts this content, I think TV stands a much better chance than a website.

Advertising server companies like Packetvision and VoD server vendors like BitBand would need to provide capabilities in their platforms to monetize this video content. I am blogging about the local community content for the second time because I feel there is a genuine demand for such content worldwide. This is an area where Internet has done a very poor job so far. And local video content may not prove to be suitable through an online site since maintenance of the site would require a substantial commitment. Instead if you make such content available over the TV in form of VoD, it might work.

Providing IPTV service since: August 2007 (in Norway)

List of challenges: Integration between ERP systems and IPTV provisioning systems; STB problems; VOD software bugs; Content owners that do not allow the company to sell channels one at the time (only bundled in packages); difficulties raising enough capital; content distributors that own distribution infrastructure.

Number of IPTV subscribers: not disclosed

IPTV equipment sourced from:
Set-top box: Motorola 1510 and 1910.
Middleware: Dreampark
Encoder: Latens
VOD Server: BitBand

Continue reading "Company Profile: Comvie" »

What sort of VoD content do you see out there in the IPTV market? Is it the same VoD content that you find with other forms of delivery?

The most popular content for VoD is recorded TV. You record the TV channels and you make that available on demand. The second most popular VoD content is movies. Local content is also becoming a big factor especially in IPTV services. These are the three major VoD content forms that are popular with IPTV users but none of these three are IPTV specific only.

What in your experience are VoD demand trends in emerging versus established markets?

In the US, the initial IPTV deployments do not necessarily have a VOD component. They rather focus on linear TV. You see more openness in deploying VoD in emerging markets versus the US where the traditional telcos have been more cautious about the introduction of new services. They typically go for linear TV first and then add some VoD and only later the real promise of IPTV services which is the new services over TV.

Are you involved in any hybrid offerings such as Verizon that is offering the VoD component over IP and the rest over legacy network?

We have a few customers in Israel, Far East and Europe, where the channels are being delivered over the air – either over satellite or over digital terrestrial – and the interactive on-demand content is delivered over IP connection through DSL or FTTH. We definitely see the hybrid approach as a trend.

When you evaluate central office of a telco for possible IPTV deployment, what would you ideally want to see there? What are the ingredients of a suitable telephone plant for an IPTV deployment?

Continue reading "Interview with Ervin Leibovici, CEO, BitBand" »

• 4.102 million VoBB subscribers in France as of end 4Q07. Added 617k subscribers during 4Q07.
• VoBB subscriber base represents about 36% ADSL customer accounts.
• 677k VoBB customers outside France (mainly in the UK). Poland: 132k VoIP subscribers, other European countries 544k.
• IP TV Subscribers: France 1,149k, Poland 40k, other European countries 54k.
• Orange Unik FMC subscribers: 573k users as of October 2007, up from 468k users at end 3Q07.

Yearly revenues of £32.3m, Y/Y increase of 27%. Gross margins 35.1%. Profit before tax £1.4m

598k IPTV Set-Top Boxes shipped during the year. Nearly all Mpeg-2 based products. Y/Y increase in shipment was 35%

On a cumulative basis, Amino has delivered 1.5 million IPTV STBs to over 1800 telcos (mostly tier 2 and tier 3)

Continue reading "Amino 2007 IPTV update" »