Year One Anniversary of IPTV Commercialization

On Dec 12, the one-year anniversary of the launch of Internet Protocol television (IPTV), which has been hailed as the driver of interactive services and a next-generation growth engine, was celebrated with fanfare. The number of subscribers to IPTV services provided by KT, SK Broadband and LG Telecom topped 1.5 million.

At the celebration of the one-year anniversary of IPTV, held at COEX in Samsung-dong, the Korea Communications Commission and Korea Digital Media Industry Association declared December 12 to be IPTV Day. Industry insiders celebrated the fact that the number of IPTV subscribers reached 1.5 million in such a short period of time, in the face of strong competition from the cable TV market that boasts 15 million subscribers.

Some, however, beg to differ, pointing out the worse than expected performance of IPTV as the number of IPTV subscribers fell far short of the initial target range of 2.5 to 3 million. The Korea Communications Commission has urged operators to come up with active marketing strategies with the aim of boosting the number of IPTV subscribers beyond 2 million.

Credit to Korea IT Times

….while World’s IPTV forecasts issued

The latest IPTV forecasts from MRG have just been published. MRG’s numbers include a forecast for IPTV subscribers, service revenues, and system revenues from 2009 to 2013. By and large last year’s predicted numbers have already been achieved.

Because the 2009 subscriber total exceeded the last forecast by 2 million, the new forecast* indicates that global IPTV subscribers will grow from 28 million in 2009 to 83 million in 2013, a compound annual growth rate of 31%. The European region will continue to lead in IPTV deployments in 2013 with a 48% share, followed by Asia, North America and Rest of World.

“Now that the economy seems to be improving, and Service Providers are still reporting solid growth, this latest edition has adjusted the forecast accordingly,” stated Jose Alvear, MRG IPTV Analyst. “This was done in response to the better-than-expected growth exhibited by the major Service Providers around the world in 2009.”

Total service revenue for 2013 is projected at US$38 billion, also up sharply from the last forecast. MRG’s new report includes added information on strategies and new services being added to IPTV offerings. “Consumers are beginning to understand the advantages of IPTV,” says Gary Schultz, MRG President. “Simultaneously, IPTV operators are facing more competition, driving rapid investment in both infrastructure and new services.”

The four regions analyzed include a breakdown of capital spending, service revenue, and DSL & IPTV subscribers; and seven discrete IPTV system sectors, including Access Systems, Video Headends, Video-on-Demand, Set-top Boxes, Middleware, Content Protection/Digital Rights Management, and System Integration/Professional Services.

Credit to RapidTVNews

AT&T adds more HD channels nationwide to its U-verse IPTV service

Subscribers to AT&T’s U-verse TV service got an additional 5 HD channels today, bringing the number of high-definition channels from the service to at least 115 in every U.S. market. New international channels were also added to U-verse, including Filipino and Cantonese programming.

The new HD channels include Cartoon Network HD, MSNBC HD, TV One HD, and TBN HD (Dec. 15). The fifth addition is available to HD Premium package customers who will now get WFN: World Fishing Network HD.

AT&T has also added VivaTV Plus as part of the Filipino Package — providing movies, concerts and TV shows in Filipino. For Cantonese viewers, TVBe provides news from Hong Kong, entertainment news, and additional Cantonese-focused programming for $17 a month. Both of those channels are available only in standard-definition.

AT&T added over 60 HD channels this year, keeping them up to speed with Verizon’s FiOS TV and surpassing cable TV HD channel counts in most markets they serve.

The company also reached a milestone 2 million U-verse TV subscribers as of last Wednesday, half of them added within 2009.

Credit to hdreport

AT&T Tops 1.8 Million IPTV Customers

AT&T added 240,000 more U-verse TV subscribers to its service in the third quarter, to stand at 1.816 million at the end of September. Although the telco continued to produce strong wireless gains it also shed 803,000 residential phone lines in the period.

Chief financial officer Rick Lindner, on AT&T's earnings call Thursday, said he expects revenue from U-verse services to exceed $2 billion this year. As the legacy services decline, he said, AT&T is taking cost out of those lines of business while increasing margins on new products.

For the IPTV service, AT&T's penetration of eligible living units was more than 12%. In areas marketed to for 24 months or more, overall penetration now exceeds 20%, according to the company.

AT&T's wireless segment continued to surge, with a 2.0 million net increase in total wireless subscribers - the highest third-quarter net gain in the company's history -- to reach 81.6 million. That included 3.2 million iPhone activations in the quarter, the highest to date.

Meanwhile, residential phone lines ended the quarter at 25.2 million, down 11.8% from a year ago, as revenue in the wireline segment fell 7.1% to $16.3 billion.

"The pattern is getting grindingly familiar. Wireless results were good... wireline results, not so much," Sanford Bernstein senior analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a research note. "And like so much of corporate America in this recession, solid earnings were the result of better-than-expected cost management against a deteriorating top line."

U-verse services are now available to more than 20 million living units. The telco said that U-verse TV's broadband attach rate continues to run "well above" 90% , and that its U-verse Voice attach rate continues to run above 60%. More than three-fourths of U-verse TV subscribers have a triple- or quad-play option from AT&T. The telco had 735,000 U-verse Voice subscribers at the end of the quarter, up from 104,000 in the year-ago period.

In the third quarter, AT&T's more advanced U-verse DSL broadband service had a net gain of 252,000 subscribers, which offset a decline in traditional DSL connections for a 90,000 net gain in wireline broadband connections. The telco had 13.55 million DSL subscribers as of the end of September,compared with 13.45 million three months prior.

AT&T lost 15,000 satellite subscribers in the period, ending the quarter with 2.195 million. The telco dropped its reseller deal with Dish Network as of January and now offers DirecTV service in areas where it has not deployed U-verse. AT&T's total video subscribers, which combine the company's U-verse and bundled satellite customers, were 4.0 million at the end of the third quarter, representing 14.9% of households served.

Overall, AT&T's third-quarter revenue was $30.86 billion, compared with $31.34 billion in the year-earlier quarter. Net income was $3.19 billion, down 1.2% year over year.

Credit to Multichannel.com

BitBand Technologies Forecasts IPTV Trends

The power of producing and distributing content no longer belongs solely to studios and technology vendors it has shifted to the consumer and consumer communities that produce, utilize and interact with the large volumes of content available today.

Analysts predict around 50 million IPTV subscribers worldwide by 2010. As viewing habits evolve from a passive consumption of TV to an interactive user experience, IPTV service providers need to quickly recognize and exploit the market opportunities that lie ahead.

BitBand’s IPTV technology serves more than 40 commercial IPTV deployments worldwide, including such pioneering IPTV deployments as Tele2 in Holland, ON Telecoms in Greece, FASTWEB in Italy and Connexion in the U.S., among others. BitBand partners with system integrators and suppliers of other components in the IPTV value chain to provide operators with a complete end-to-end solution.

BitBand expects to see the following key trends in IPTV in 2008:

• Eastern Europe as an emerging market. With quad and triple-play heavily embraced by new players implementing technology and business lessons learned in Western Europe, carriers and service providers in the region will take advantage of the industry’s accumulated expertise and skip efforts to modernize legacy equipment or infrastructures suitable for IPTV delivery.
• HDTV is on the rise and shifting from early adopters to mainstream viewers, creating strong demand for the highest level of subscriber quality of experience. Technology has to be developed to ensure the QOE levels that now become mandatory.
• Networking in the home. Technology advancements in consumer premises equipment and the IPTV supply chain in general will enable increased connectivity between the various components in the home, targeting the enhanced digital lifestyle with such services as instant messaging and progressive download. Through a combination of the service provider and home networks, a small server residing in the house will provide content services to a variety of devices within or around the premises, over a variety of wired and wireless networks.
• Niche content is king and long-tail content is becoming a reality. Service providers will be required to make accessible huge volumes of content, while employing intuitive and simple access methods. The full content life cycle will need to be managed in a flexible way, making room for innovative CDN platforms -- a key factor in the success of IPTV services.
• Support for multiple viewing platforms. Consumer mobility drives the need to support a variety of end devices (terminals) to which the content is fed. Users’ viewing experiences should be automatically adapted for the different devices and networks so that the best experience on each device is guaranteed. Remaining issues to be resolved include the size of video data and content rights.
• New entrants create segmented markets. More alternative service providers are offering IPTV services, opening up the market and driving growth and competition. Traditional communications players will be forced to present a differentiated offer, either through the introduction of new value-added services or competitively priced entertainment packages.
• User-generated content. TV “of the people, for the people” will continue to grow in popularity. Users are driving content and will want to incorporate that content as part of their traditional TV experience.
• TV and Internet will continue to merge. The drive to turn the TV into an Internet-capable device is likely to continue, despite the failure of many prior attempts. The key drivers to success are simplicity of access and emphasis on the group experience of TV consumption.
• Advertising will drive revenue. Targeted advertising is another phenomenon making its way from the Internet to the IPTV experience, providing another tool for revenue generation and subscriber retention.
• The shift to On-Demand. The trend of increased migration of TV consumption from linear to non-linear TV (TV On-Demand) will pick up pace, driven by innovative new ways of serving TV in a time-shifted manner and excess bandwidth available in the Next Generation networks. We expect significant increase in concurrent viewers of such services.
• Beijing 2008. The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games will be the dominant driver for IPTV expansion and adoption across China. Beijing’s efforts to leverage this event for the world stage, coupled with the desire of service providers across the globe to deliver Olympic events to subscribers in all forms and on all devices will prompt service innovation, technology development and regulation flexibility, speeding up the pace of change and stimulating even more progress in the IPTV space.

Source : TVOver.net

WiMAX Gains Serious Momentum as Trials Lead to Deployments

The global telecommunications industry is on the cusp of major change, and operators are approaching critical decisions about their 4G strategies, as mobile WiMAX (802.16e) starts to move from trials and pilots to the first real-world WiMAX network deployments.

As described in a new study from ABI Research, mobile operators and other service providers are planning mobile WiMAX networks all over the world, mainly in the 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz bands. “The mobile wireless industry is in a state of major change as mobile operators decide which IP-OFDMA path they will take for their 4G networks,” says principal mobile broadband analyst Philip Solis. “The new and unproven (on a large commercial scale) mobile WiMAX has positioned itself against the potential Goliath that LTE (Long Term Evolution) is expected to become.”

The research forecasts substantial numbers of WiMAX subscribers worldwide: more than 95 million using CPE devices by 2012, and almost 200 million using mobile devices, with some overlap between the two groups.

Solis points out that while WiMAX equipment interoperability certification timelines have slipped somewhat, and LTE benefits from having evolved out of the widely-deployed GSM technology, WiMAX has at least a two year head start in reaching the market.

The major semiconductor and equipment makers, with the exception of Qualcomm and Ericsson, are staking out their positions for this emerging sector, while operators’ enthusiasm, led by Sprint’s and Clearwire’s firm commitments in the United States, is rising sharply. Vodafone is looking to WiMAX for some of its newer markets such as the Middle East and Eastern Europe; BT and Telecom Italia Mobile are also showing interest. And ABI Research understands that another as yet unnamed “major European mobile operator” is “seriously considering WiMAX.”

Meanwhile, amid this increasing momentum, chipset companies are positioning themselves to support a wide variety of device types beyond the traditional handsets and laptops, including UMPCs, mobile Internet devices, and consumer electronics products such as portable game devices, portable media players, and imaging devices.

The new ABI Research study, “WiMAX Market Analysis and Forecasts”, examines major drivers and barriers for WiMAX and compares it to 3G and other 4G technologies. The report contains forecasts for 802.16-2004 and 802.16e-2005. It forms part of four ABI Research Services: Digital Media, Mobile Content, Mobile Devices, and Mobile Operators.

Source : TVOver.net

YouTube announces the YouTube Nonprofit Program

Hundreds of nonprofits currently leverage YouTube to raise awareness of their causes. Today at the Clinton Global Initiative, YouTube announced the YouTube Nonprofit Program, a way to make it even easier for people to find, watch and engage with nonprofit video content on the site.

YouTube's 2007/2008 Clinton Global Initiative commitment enables nonprofit organizations (in the U.S. those with 501c3 tax filing status) that register for the program to receive a free nonprofit specific YouTube channel where they can upload footage of their work, public service announcements, calls to action and more. The channel will also allow them to collect donations with no processing costs using the newly launched Google Checkout for Non-Profits. YouTube's global platform enables nonprofits to deliver their message, showcase their impact and needs, and encourage supporters to take action.
"Video, unlike any other medium, allows nonprofits to give a tangible demonstration of their efforts, connect with people and exponentially widen their reach," said Douglas Staples, Senior Vice President, Strategic Marketing & Communications from the March of Dimes. "We are excited to be an initial participant in the program. We'll use our YouTube channel to reach out to an audience of all ages and engage them in our mission, which is to give every baby a healthy start, and we encourage other nonprofits to do the same."

YouTube Nonprofit Program participants will receive:

• A premium channel on YouTube that serves as a nonprofit's hub for their uploaded videos. Through the channel, people can connect with a nonprofit via messages, subscriptions, comments and more. Nonprofits will also receive enhanced channel branding features and increased upload capacity.
• Designation as a "Nonprofit" on YouTube that clearly identifies organizations as a nonprofit for YouTube community.
• The ability to embed a Google Checkout donation button on their channel and video watch pages, allowing people to quickly and securely make a contribution directly from YouTube. Starting today, nonprofits who offer Google Checkout for Non-Profits as a donation option -- whether through YouTube or on their own sites -- will receive 100 percent of donated funds, as Google has committed to processing all donations for free through at least the end of 2008.
• In the coming months, nonprofit channels will have a centralized area on YouTube, making them and their videos more easily discoverable.

"When YouTube was founded we dreamed that people would someday leverage the site to make the world a better place," said YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley. "It is an honor to have great organizations and individuals utilizing the YouTube to raise awareness of noble causes and we are thrilled to offer a program that helps them thrive and inspire change."

At launch there will be a thirteen organizations participating in the YouTube Nonprofit Program including:

24 Hours for Darfur * American Cancer Society * Autism Speaks * 92nd Street Y * Asia Society * Strong American Schools' ED in '08 * Friends of the Earth * International Rescue Committee * March of Dimes * YouthNoise * The ONE Campaign * The Clinton Global Initiative * World Vision Australia

Application Process

Nonprofits can apply for a nonprofit channel type by going to youtube.com/nonprofits and filling out a short application, which will be processed by our grants team. This page will also contain information on how to take advantage of this new channel type, as well as some tips for how to use YouTube effectively for advocacy and fundraising.

Credit to TVOver.net