Friday, May 18, 2007

Telfonica Targets 1M IPTV Subscribers

Telefonica's Imagenio IPTV service is preparing a new assault on the pay-TV market from September 2007, with new programming and more channels available. The company plans to offer up to 200 TV channels by the end of the year and hopes to reach one million subscribers in 2008.

Telefonica has made a good start and seems to have the service in hand. This is a good time for it to get more aggressive.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

What access technology are they using? Last time i've heard, they were using only ADSL2+ to support their IPTV service.

In order to compete effeciently they're gonna have to use some sort of FTTX , don't you think? the same goes to FT .

Bob Larribeau said...

Ohad,

I believe that Telefonica is offering only SD programming. ADSL-2+ should give them about 15 Mbps, which is plenty, even for MPEG-2.

ADSL-2+ will start to become a squeeze when it adds HD channels. Supporting multiple HD sets will require VDSL or FTTP. That is the direction that Deutsche Telekom has gone.

ADSL-2+ is a pretty good technology for now in Europe, since supporting multiple TVs is not a big issue in most countries. HD will push carriers into VDSL at a minimum.

Bob