IPTV services drawing more customers worldwide

Television over internet has been growing faster than predicted by broadband critics, especially in the region of Europe. According to Point Topic’ report on the growth of IPTV services worldwide during the last year, there are nearly 10.5 million IPTV customers worldwide. This shows 27 percent growth in subscriptions when compared with previous quarter. However, another report on VoD services (from Informa) shows that IPTV services worldwide have more than 12 million customers while Europe alone contributes the majority of IPTV subscriptions (57 %).

After the end of third quarter, Asia Pacific region is reported to have 2,559,000 IPTV customers, showing 17.6 % increase from the previous quarter. In Europe, currently there are over 6,520,000 IPTV customers while it is 1,416,000 with North America. It should be noted that there were less than 2 million IPTV customers by the end of the second quarter of 2006. During the last one year, IPTV services have attracted more customers thanks to the launch of BBC iPlayer, Tiscali TV and Sky digital TV channels over internet.

As far as the speeds are concerned, Sky broadband is reported to have delivered excellent download speeds that did not disappoint its customers. Virgin Media and Tiscali also offered speeds that are closer to the speeds that they advertised, as per the report from Point Topic. Following these ISPs, TalkTalk, AOL, BT and Orange also find a place in this table.

Interestingly, the report shows that only 15 percent of the 8MB broadband customers could achieve speeds close to the maximum speed, while it is just 4 percent with 16 MB broadband.