"The economics of IPTV – Making IPTV profitable"

Munich, 2008

IPTV is leaving behind its initial technical glitches and slowly moving out of its niche position in terms of subscriber numbers to compete head to head with established media players in the living room: At the end of 2007 IPTV reached over ten million subscribers worldwide. While this number is still relatively small compared to a telecommunications customer base of several hundreds of millions, experts are forecasting an increase of over 500% in the global IPTV subscriber base, reaching 60 million by 2010. According to the study all these IPTV deployments however will have to be carefully managed to achieve their intended financial benefits.

The future and success of IPTV will be strongly influenced by the ability of telecommunications operators to shift the focus of their IPTV strategies and operations away from technical features (e.g. interactivity, time shift, advertising capabilities) and subscriber numbers to generating sustainable financial returns. "Most companies understand that the economic benefits of IPTV do not come easily" says Tim Bottke, Senior Project Manager and Broadband and IPTV expert at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. "Many originally positive IPTV business cases are now conveniently forgotten by responsible managers, as they reveal significant gaps to real performance in terms of both revenues and spending."