INSIGHTanalysis: Media Healthcheck – April 2007
At the start of April, the latest Digital Progress Report was published by Ofcom, showing that half (50%) of all UK adults lived in households with a broadband connection in the fourth quarter of 2006.
Meanwhile, Point Topic published a report saying that the amount of people in the UK now subscribing to broadband packages has hit 13 million.
Point Topic said that this reflects a worldwide trend which has seen a boost in the number of high speed internet connections being set up in domestic surroundings and in the workplace (see Subscribers To Broadband Packages Rise).
However, the Broadband Stakeholder Group (BSG) said that the UK could be left behind in the broadband stakes as several key competitor nations are in the process of deploying networks that are capable of delivering much higher access speeds than are currently available in the UK.
It added that there is little prospect of widespread deployment of next generation broadband in the UK, with operators having difficulty justifying the large investments needed for high-speed networks.
The BSG report called on the government to establish a target to ensure that by 2012 the UK remains in the upper quartile of OECD nations in terms of the quality and reach of broadband services in the UK (see Challenges Ahead For UK Broadband).
April also saw eMarketer announce that the number of broadband households worldwide reached approximately 251 million at the end of 2006. The US and China are the two largest broadband markets in the world, at 54.6 and 46.6 million broadband households respectively, said the online market research firm (see 251 Million Broadband Households Worldwide).
The eMarketer report says that countries such as South Korea, Japan and, to a lesser extent, the US, are entering a new phase of broadband development with the market moving from high-speed internet to very-high-speed-internet.
The increasingly high speeds achievable by broadband have meant that video applications are becoming increasingly popular and the latest data from Screen Digest predicted that the European market for IPTV will double in 2007.
Screen Digest forecasts that subscriptions to IPTV services across Europe will almost double from 2.9 million in 2006 to 5.6 million in 2007, with subscription revenues from IPTV increasing from £470 million to over £1 billion. Almost 1 million of those new customers will be in France (see European IPTV Market To Double).
Sticking with TV, Strategy Analytics forecast that 90% of UK homes will be watching High Definition TV by 2020, as long as Ofcom allocates spectrum on the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform for HDTV (see 90% Of UK Homes Could Be Watching HDTV By 2020), whilst in separate research, Screen Digest predicted that there will be up to 82 million European HD ready households by 2010 (48% of TV households) (see European HD Market To Grow).