IPTV WORLD: North American IPTV Subscribers Double

North American IPTV subscribers more than doubled in size in 2008 with growth of 113 percent despite the global economic downturn, according to stats released Wednesday at IPTV World Forum by the Broadband Forum.

The report, prepared for the Broadband Forum by industry analysts Point Topic, found North America had 3.84 million IPTV subscribers in 2008, up from 1.75 million in 2007.

The United States makes up 94 percent of the North American market share with 3.63 million IPTV subscribers. Canada has 5.41 percent with slightly more than 200,000 subscribers.

Worldwide IPTV subscriber totals have now reached 21.7 million, which is an increase of 63 percent on the end of 2007 figures.

The 63 percent increase is testimony to telcos’ efforts to deploy IPTV, said Laurie Gonzalez, marketing director of the Broadband Forum, in an advance briefing with xchange. In particular, she noted that North American telcos are being very aggressive since they were not very involved in IPTV before last year.

“A lot of people in the past have said IPTV will not become mass market or will not roll out until we have fiber,” said Gonzalez. “I think companies like AT&T and many in Asia and all throughout Europe are really showing that you can roll out IPTV very effectively with ADSL2+ and VDSL2 and other options as well. To me this is really an exciting thing to see is that nobody is waiting for fiber to make this possible and to get it out to the most customers as they can.”

In North America, the proportion of customers served by ADSL2+ was about 20 percent in 2008. FTTH makes up about half of the connections while FTTP accounts for around 30 percent.

Research also out this week from Informa Telecoms places U.S. subscriber growth at 152 percent, differing slightly from Broadband Report's analysis.

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