IP Democracy: Telco Video Customer Count Reaches 2.7 Million

As I discussed in an article over at IP Media Monitor,  the incumbent telcos have an uphill battle in finding a way to offer multichannel video services that can compete with their biggest rivals — the incumbent cable operators.  Verizon is pursuing a turbo-charged fiber-to-the-home strategy, which takes a long time (and a lot of money). AT&T, on the other hand, is trying to cut corners by building out a fiber-to-the-node architecture for its U-verse video services, a plan that is causing nothing but headaches for the carrier.

In the meantime, however, the phone companies are still managing to rack up multichannel video subscriber gains, as the table below shows.  From Q4 05 to Q4 06, the telco video customer count jumped from 1.517 million to 2.671 million, an increase of 76%. 

Most of this growth flowed from the old-time DBS partnerships that the three big phone companies (BellSouth is now a part of AT&T, of course, but I’ve kept it separate in the table) struck up about four years ago.  Verizon, however, is juicing the telco video market up a bit with its FiOS TV service.  Of the group, Verizon posted the biggest gains in video customer counts during Q4 06 — 133,000 net new video subs. during the quarter — with a good chunk of those, 89,000, flowing from the telco’s FiOS initiative.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on February 26, 2007 3:58 PM to IP Democracy