IPTV "upstarts" are proving to be winners in the battle for new pay TV subscribers worldwide, according to a new report from Infonetics Research.
The firm's Pay TV Subscriber Database report singled out Russia's Rostelecom, Brazil's GVT and Dutch provider KPN as among those new players that are making it interesting for incumbents. KPN, for instance, saw a 77 percent increase in IPTV subscribers in the last year while GVT was up 62 percent and Rostelecom was up 42 percent. Deutsche Telekom's Eastern European divisions are "also gaining IPTV subscribers at a healthy clip," an Infonetics press release noted.
Of course there are some statistics that aren't surprises such as the fact that China Telecom leads the world with 20.5 million IPTV subscribers as of the fourth quarter of last year.
"Our Pay TV Database gets the point across that telcos in both emerging and mature markets can do well, even when the market is saturated with cable and satellite providers," said Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV in a release, citing in particular IPTV's success in Eastern Europe "where competition for new pay TV subscribers is particularly fierce."
The report also listed Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) as the world's leading cable TV provider, followed by Jiangsu Cable TV, Guangdong Cable TV, Shandong Cable TV and Sichuan Cable TV while DirecTV (Nasdaq: DTV) continued to lead satellite providers followed by Dish Network (Nasdaq: DISH), BSkyB and DirecTV Latin America.
The report correlates with information from the Spanish Telecommunications Market Commission (CMT) which said that pay TV outperformed free-to-air (FTA) TV in terms of revenue for the first time in history in 2012, according to a story in Advanced Television.
Total pay TV amounted to 1.7 billion euros ($2.18 billion) while FTA came in at 1.6 billion euros ($2.05 billion) in 2012. Pay TV revenues, the report stated, came in 2.5 higher and FTA fell 17.9 percent. IPTV was a big part of that, as revenues for that sector were up 11.6 percent year-over-year compared to a fall of 11.6 percent for cable.
For more:
- Infonetics has this press release
- Advanced Television has this story
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