Advanced Television

RGU growth, cable widens gap on telcos

September 23, 2011

In the battle between the telcos and cable TV industries, cable service providers are pulling ahead of telecoms service providers. According to data from TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Pay-TV research service, in Q2 2011, the number of IPTV subscribers worldwide exceeded 50 million as telcos continued striving to exploit their fixed broadband customer base to gain a piece of the lucrative pay-TV market. While telcos have some cause to be pleased with the progress of their IPTV initiatives, in Q2 2011, cablecos around the world surpassed a larger milestone – in aggregate cablecos now have over 100 million broadband subscribers (and over 65 million voice subscribers) on their networks.

“Cablecos’ broadband and voice subscriber wins at the expense of telcos far outnumber their pay-TV subscriber losses due to IPTV, and ARPUs for both broadband and voice are more than double that of IPTV,” said TeleGeography’s John Dinsdale. “There are differences by region, but globally, cablecos’ expansion into telecoms markets has had a transformational impact on their growth and financial performance, while the impact of IPTV for telcos has been only marginal.”

Categories: Cable, Markets, Pay TV, Research, Telco