The largest bases of IPTV subscribers--and therefore the biggest clusters of IPTV providers--can be found in Europe and Asia Pacific, according to research compiled by SNL Kagan. China Telecom and China Unicom serve the largest percentage of IPTV subscribers, the report stated.
According to Kagan's "The state of Top 20 Global IPTV Operators," there were 57.7 million IPTV subscribers at the beginning of this year and 35.5 percent of them were in China. Asian telcos as a whole accounted for 49.2 percent of the top 20 services providers based on subscribership, but France was the second largest IPTV market, with four operators ranked among the global top 20.
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Mediaroom--soon to be Ericsson (Nasdaq: ERIC) Mediaroom if all goes well--was the world's most deployed IPTV platform, serving 16 percent of the world's IPTV subscribers at the end of 2012 the researchers said.
The SNL Kagan research confirmed what seemed obvious: IPTV is attracting a lot of business--just not in the United States.
"IPTV is the fastest-growing pay TV platform from a global perspective (increasing by 29.6 percent year-over-year in 2012 compared to cable's 2.2 percent," said Julija Jurkevic, media and communications analyst at SNL Kagan in a press release. "IPTV subscriber populations are largely concentrated in Europe and Asia where accelerated rollouts of next generation broadband networks are driving video service adoption."
As for Mediaroom, it's the leading platform pretty much by default, the researchers said.
"The majority of IPTV operators prefer to partner with third party vendors for IPTV middleware, but some have chosen to develop it themselves," the press release stated. "Among the global top 20 IPTV providers, a total of seven developed IPTV middleware in-house … with 15 out of 20 operators choosing to partner with middleware vendors from their home regions."
Of the top 20 IPTV providers worldwide, nine came from Europe, where they served 17-plus million subscribers; seven were from the Asia Pacific region, although they served 28-plus million subscribers; two were from the U.S., with a little over nine million subscribers; and two were from Eastern Europe, with just over 2.4 million subscribers.
For more:
- see this press release
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