Global IPTV Households To Near 34 Million By 2010
Global IPTV subscriptions are expected to jump from two million in 2005 to 34 million in 2010, reflecting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 60%, according to The Diffusion Group’s (TDG) latest report, IPTV 2006 – The Future of IP Media.
The EMEA region is expected to top 14 million IPTV households by 2010, with the UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany accounting for 87% of the total. Research released by Screen Digest at the close of last year predicted that France will lead the market with 2.4 million subscribers by 2009 (see IPTV To Have Significant Impact On European Markets).
In contrast to IPTV 2006 – The Future of IP Media, Research and Markets recently released a forecast which said that the number of global IPTV subscribers will grow from 4.3 million in 2005 to 36.8 million in 2009 (see Europe Leading IPTV Boom).
The TDG report says that North American IPTV households are expected to near 14 million by 2010, with the US accounting for 80% of those subscriptions. While the majority of 2005 and 2006 IPTV deployments have been executed by small rural operators, TDG expects the new deployments by Verizon and AT&T to greatly increase subscribers, starting in 2007.
However, Asian IPTV deployments are expected to account for only 5.6 million subscriptions by 2010, with Herve Utheza, one of the report’s authors, saying that although IPTV deployments are being pushed in Hong Kong and “despite ongoing IPTV trials in both China and India, consensus expectations regarding the growth of the Asian IPTV market are simply not achievable.”
Utheza sees the impending launch of digital terrestrial television in China as the primary reason for poor IPTV demand in the region. “After many years of political wrangling, the Chinese government is about to announce a single DTV standard for both fixed and mobile services. Once this happens, the government will start pushing more aggressively the distribution of digital set-top boxes as a means of ramping up the number of digital TV subscribers.”
The Chinese government has said that the new standard will eventually serve more than half of China’s TV viewers, especially those in suburban or rural areas. TDG says that until then, analogue and broadband based services may find a healthy market for a few years to come.
Colin Dixon, co-author of the report, said: “IPTV market conditions vary widely depending on the country or geography in question, entailing that individual markets will evolve and behave in very unique ways.”
Dixon noted that a handful of individual service operators will account for 75% of the deployed volume with the remaining 25% split between hundreds of other operators. “These conditions will pose a challenge to all types of IPTV solutions vendors, one that requires detailed and flexible implementation and go-to-market stratgeies.”
The TDG research uses a bottom up forecasting model to predict IPTV deployments and also analyses and forecasts demand among ancillary markets including IPTV set-top boxes, chipsets, video-on-demand systems, head-end encoder and multiplexer equipment, and conditional access systems.
A recent survey carried out by Accenture, in association with the Economist Intelligence Unit, revealed that executives involved with or close to the IPTV business expect video-on-demand (VoD) to be the chief money maker among different IPTV applications (see Video-On-Demand Predicted To Be IPTV Revenue Generator).