The 2007 NCTA Cable Show, May 7-9th in Las Vegas, “brings convergence home” with video, voice, data and mobility. The triple play may be moving up a notch, but most of the focus seems to be on HDTV, DVRs, Open Settops, and wireless distribution inside the home.
The National Cable Television Association says it’s the largest tradeshow floor in the telecommunications industry. Check out their Schedule, Sessions, Speakers and Blog.
Some of the more interesting sessions include; Cable: The Case for Mobile, Mobile Advertising, Video’s Online Adventure: New Ideas for a New Generation of Television, Cable without the Cable: Strategies for the Wild, Wireless World, Engineering Change: The Technology of Telephony, and Mobile TV and Video, Past and Future.
Cable is getting (some) competition from telephone providers. Verizon has more than 350,000 FiOS TV subscribers while AT&T says it now has over 18,000 subscribers to U-verse.
Not that cable operators are shaking in their pole climbing boots. In the United States there are 65.5 million basic cable subscribers and 51.6 million premium units, generating $27 billion in ad revenue and $75 billion in annual subscription fees.
Comcast sees $1B in Internet ad revenue in the next few years. Comcast said Monday it has signed an online advertising partnership with Yahoo to handle display and video advertising on its Comcast.net portal. The site has 15 million monthly visitors, who collectively view 80 million videos each month.
Comcast has managed to keep the cost of cable modem service (about $40/mo) nearly the same since it began the service nearly 10 years ago while their cost to deliver broadband has plummeted. The biggest MSOs are Comcast (24 million subs) and Time Warner Cable (14.4 million subs).
Most of the world’s IPTV subscribers (68%) are in Western Europe, and 28% are in Asia. North America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa combined make up only 8% of the world’s 2.7 million IPTV subscribers. That may be changing.
Three of the world’s largest IPTV deployments are currently on Chinese soil. The largest is in Hong Kong, where PCCW’s Now TV is the city’s largest pay-television operator, with more than 800,000 subscribers. On the mainland, Shanghai Media Group (SMG) BesTV launched its service in Shanghai last September, and has signed more than 150,000 customers in its partnership with China Telecom, the government-owned telephone company. In the north, in Harbin, China Netcom and SMG have deployed IPTV since the summer of 2005 and are nearing system capacity with 112,000 customers.
Giant Indian carrier BSNL is planning to roll out Internet Protocol Television Services in many Indian cities. The company is tailoring this venture due to the success of the service in Pune. BSNL hopes to deliver IPTV in 70 towns by 2007 and 600 towns by 2010, with mobile TV in top 20 cities and towns in 2007. BSNL or Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited is India’s largest ISP, and seventh largest in the world. BSNL has footprints throughout India except for the metropolitan cities of Mumbai and New Delhi which are managed by MTNL, and presently commands over 33.7 million Wireline, 2.9 million CDMA and 23 million GSM Mobile subscribers. And growing fast.
Other news from the show:
- FCC Chairman Kevin Martin addresses Cable Show attendees today at 1pm PT. The FCC and the Consumer Electronics Association want newer cable boxes that use special card inserts that enhance security against cable-signal pirates and provide more “open” competition.
- Comcast chairman Brian Roberts demonstrated DOCSIS 3.0 with download speeds of up to 100 Mbps.
- Motorola, Vyyo and StarHub announced the successful testing of DOCSIS 3.0 services with speeds exceeding 145 Mbps.
- Motorola will showcase mobile video experiences such as the company’s Follow Me TV solution, which allows customers to move content between rooms and to portable devices.
- Sprint expanded offering of cable telephony services. Sprint now provides VoIP services to 14 leading cable companies, supporting over 1.7 million residential customers on its network and, through its cable partners, reaches approximately 34 million homes passed.
Verizon posted more details on its FiOS services, including an expectation of 3-4 million FiOS TV customers by 2010, representing a market penetration of 25%-30%. Verizon had 864,000 FiOS Internet customers and 348,000 FiOS TV customers at the end of March 2007. It projects 7 million FiOS Internet subs by 2010, a 35%-40% market penetration rate.
- AT&T began selling its U-verse TV service this month in Los Angeles. AT&T said in April it had 18,000 subscribers to U-verse.
- Time Warner Cable has lured 2.1 million residential phone customers in its service’s first three years. It’s now escalating competition with telephone providers.
- Panasonic showcased its OCAP-based cable product line-up. The Open Cable Application Platform (OCAP) specification, licensed by CableLabs, provides a standard way for set-tops, TVs and other devices to access interactive cable services like video-on-demand. Until OCAP boxes are widely deployed, MSOs will have a massive legacy of pre-OCAP devices.
What about the giant AWS auction with Sprint last year and the 700 MHz auction late this year? Not buzz worthy, apparently.
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