The six channels of films, TV series and on-demand programming will be available on a TV, a PC or a mobile phone, the company said. Orange said it expects to launch its Cinéma Séries service in France in the fourth quarter of this year. Orange said recently it has close to 1.4 million subscribers for its IPTV service in France.
New research from Frost & Sullivan has found that IPTV service is a “must” for operators with broadband speeds upwards of 10Mbps, but that deployment’s need a full “offensive” strategy to really take off.
The analyst firm’s report, ‘IPTV Business Case’, reveals that the IPTV subscriber base in Asia Pacific reached 4.1 million in 2007 (a third of the global base) and estimates this will reach 22.4 million by the end of 2013, at a CAGR of 32.7%. Frost & Sullivan however said that telcos need to have a more offensive approach in order to fully optimise bandwidth capacity. “As the broadcasting and pay-TV industry is uncharted territory for most telecom players, telcos will need to penetrate the market with an offensive approach, complete with a content acquisition strategy, to successfully attract cable or satellite TV subscribers,” said research analyst Adeel Najam.
Najam believes that IPTV will ensure lower subscriber churn rates and increase operator revenues and ARPU through service bundling. “Service providers with high-speed broadband transmission networks have the competitive advantage in deploying IPTV services as they can leverage their networks to offer bandwidth intensive services like HDTV,” he said. “The first line of attack for any
fixed-network operator to realistically transform into multi-play service providers offering voice, data and video services is by converting its existing broadband subscribers.” According to Najam, wider deployment of IPTV will increase competition in the pay-TV industry and encourage the introduction of value-added services and production of local content. “We expect this to eventually reduce the overall cost of multi-play services and boost uptake of IPTV,” he said.
“In some cases we also expect governments and regulators to create a level playing field between various technology platforms in terms of content ownership which would give the industry a fillip.” Of the 13 countries studied, the top two (by subscribers) were Hong Kong (1.02 million, 24.9% of the region’s IPTV subscriber base) and China (0.93 million, 22.7%). Hong Kong has the highest household IPTV penetration rate (45.3%), and is the only market where IPTV dominates pay-TV
with a 46.7% subscriber market share in 2007 through incumbent PCCW.
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