IPTV enjoyed a “banner year” last year, adding more than 10 million subscribers, mostly in emerging markets, research firms say.

 

Total broadband takeup also grew strongly, registering another 58 million lines to take the global total to 466.95 million, Point Topic said.

 

The research firm said IPTV subscriptions grew 47%, or 10.8 million subs – compared with 9.8 million in 2008 - to 33 million. Another research house, Informa, recorded 10.3 million new IPTV subs in 2009, bringing total subscriptions to 29.7 million.

 

The bulk of this growth came from emerging markets and where there is little competition from other multichannel TV services, Informa said. IPTV accounted for just 5% of the multichannel TV market by end 2009.

 

The firm predicts the market is poised for growth, as cable, satellite, and terrestrial TV firms increasingly embrace the underlying IPTV technology, which is already available in 50 countries.

 

China, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong were all in the top ten IPTV markets. Point Topic chief analyst Oliver Johnson said that with the freeing of regulatory hurdles in Asia would further stimulate growth.

 

“With South Korea looking strong and China building on its acceleration in the latter stages of 2009 the region could easily dominate IPTV growth in 2010," he said.
 

Asian carriers already account for 39% of global broadband subscriptions, adding 29.2 million customers last year.

 

China remains the world’s biggest broadband market by customer numbers, passing the 100 million milestone in the fourth quarter.

 

Point Topic said the fastest growing major broadband countries last year were all in Asia: the Philippines, which grew at more than 60%, India (40+%), Indonesia and Vietnam.

	Broadband 2008Q4		Broadband 2009Q4	yearly growth	market share	net adds 09
Asia	153,905,582		183,090,647	18.96%	39.21%	29,185,065
Europe	129,145,899		142,931,560	10.67%	30.61%	13,785,661
Americas	113,500,830		127,177,224	12.05%	27.24%	13,676,394
Middle East/Africa	12,269,412	13,718,675		11.81%	2.94%	1,449,263
Total	408,821,723		466,918,106	14.21%	100.00%

Source: Point Topic