Chunghwa Telecom Ends 2007 with 394K IPTV Subscribers

Chunghwa Telecom, the incumbent in Taiwan, ended 2007 with 394 thousand subscribers to its MOD IPTV service. This is up from 249 thousand at the end of 2006.

Chunghwa has 4,500 hours of video on demand content available and updates 400 to 500 hours each week. It also offer more than 60 broadcast channels, which is up from 32 channels in 2006. It will also offer the 2008 Olympic games in HD as well as some baseball games.

Chunghwa is also making significant progress with its fiber deployments. Its fiber subscriptions increased from 185.3 thousand at the end of 2006, to 536.9 thousand at the end 2007 an increase of more than 350 thousand. It currently provides fiber services in 15,383 buildings, which is 90 percent market share among all fiber operators in Taiwan.

Chunghwa is raising the bandwidth of its DSL services as well in order to better serve its IPTV service. At the end of 2007, 28.5 percent of its broadband subscribers had speeds in excess of 8 Mbps., which is up from 20.6 percent at the end of 2006.

Chunghwa is continuing rapid but steady progress with its IPTV service. 2008 should be a good year for it as well.