IPTV is alive, well and flourishing in the international marketplace. And it's not hurting too badly in the United States, either, according to statistics compiled by Point Topic in its October Global Broadband Trends report, presented by Broadband Forum.
The report showed that IPTV has 69.1 million worldwide subscribers but also noted growth is slowing down--5.5 percent this quarter compared to 7.3 percent last year. Russia, the report notes, "continues to post much higher growth than the rest of the market."
"IPTV is still a relatively young technology and so we can expect to see such high growth figures across many markets," the report said.
The statistics showed China on top, with 16.275 million IPTV subscribers but only a 7 percent growth rate. France, in second place with 12.788 million, joined the United States, in third place with 9.662 million, with only 3 percent growth rates.
While Russia ranked only seventh among the top 10 countries, with 1.927 million IPTV subscribers, it showed the highest growth rate of 17 percent. The Netherlands, coming in 10th place with 1.151 million subs, showed the second highest growth rate of 8 percent.
Since the report primarily covered international broadband expansion, it should be noted that China, with 167.014 million broadband subscribers, came in fourth in that sector with a 15.8 percent annual growth rate. The United States, with 94 million subs, came in second in number of subscribers but had an annual growth rate of only 5 percent and a quarterly growth rate of 0.8 percent. The fastest growing broadband country was Russia, which grew its base 28.3 percent year-over-year to end up in fifth place with 22.380 million subscribers. Ukraine was the second fastest growing broadband country, lifting its base 27.9 percent year-over-year to 6.794 million subscribers--still only 16th place on the top 20 in total numbers.
"Point Topic has been tracking global shifts in broadband subscriber numbers in every quarter since 1999. Over the past five years, we have consistently posted highest subscriber growth in the first quarter of the year," said Oliver Johnson, CEO of Point Topic, in the company's research notes.
Johnson added that "the peaks in growth are getting lower and lower," even dropping between the 2.5 percent it anticipated for this quarter when it fell to 2.1 percent.
For more:
- see this Point Topic research
- and this Broadband Forum report
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