According to the Broadband Forum, there are now 15.5 million IPTV subscribers worldwide, with 2.2 million out of that total coming from North America. Where in North America, I wonder? Or more to the point, what is the Broadband Forum defining as IPTV?
AT&T stated it had 378,000 U-verse subscribers as of the first quarter of this year – a nice increase from the 100K mark AT&T hit just last September, but nowhere near the 2.2 million number. Is Broadband Forum counting Verizon as IPTV? Part of the Verizon FiOS TV service uses IP, but part is RF-based, and it doesn’t typically get the IPTV classification. On the other hand, some folks use IPTV to refer to any kind of Telco TV, which would certainly include Verizon. Unless Canada has a huge number of IPTV deployments, I can only guess that the Broadband Forum is using Verizon to fill out its numbers. Interesting. I wonder what that means for the subscriber tallies in the rest of the world.
Well, since there are no OTT services doing live TV, just downloaded TV and Movies, I don’t see how it could be anything but Verizon. And as you say, Verizon today isn’t IPTV, at least not for live TV.
Verizon FiOS has 1.2M TV subs as of 5/5/08. AT&T U-Verse had 379,000 (from AT&T quarterly earnings) as of 3/31. Total 1.58M. Take some guesses and sure, maybe 2.2M now.
AT&T has their next earnings call in 6 days on the 23rd, so we’ll know more then.
There may be a few IPTV subs in localized FTTP deployments (?), but I can’t imagine they add up to much either.
Looks like AT&T’s earnings call revealed the number is now 549,000 subs. So now 1.2M + 549,000 = 1.75M. Still not 2.2M though. Those broadband forum guys are smoking something.
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