South East Asia region is the current leader in IPTV adoption, with seven out of 13 countries already having rolled out some sort of service including PCCW’s NOW, which is the largest IPTV deployment in the world, and accounts for one third of the total global IPTV subscribers. According to Gartner, the number of IPTV subscribers in these countries will double by end of 2005. One of the reasons why IPTV has been quick to take-off in Asia is because of the availablity of new broadband networks that can support higher speed flavors of DSL. The population densities in most Asian cities, and the short distance to central offices is the main reason why you have seen higher deployment of DSL/Broadband in that part of the world. Second reason – there are no legacy cable networks, and people want to see TV. It does make me wonder – just like cellular and broadband networks, the massive scale adoption in Asia could give the a region a leg-up in defining the future direction of IPTV as well. Any thoughts?
Further details at Converge Network Digest.