[Satellite News 03-29-10] In the battle against satellite, cable and telco operators are looking for new ways to attract the consumer. This was at the heart of some key presentations at the IPTV World Forum in London last week.
    Peter Hill, vice president of architecture, service concepts and video for AT&T operations gave a presentation outlining AT&T’s vision for taking on cable and DTH in the United States. The telecoms giant ended 2009 with just over two million customers for its U-Verse IPTV service. With its U-Verse IPTV service, the operator is placing a lot of faith in its Total DVR Solution, which it believes gives it a competitive edge over satellite pay-TV providers. Hill explained how the operator’s strategy has evolved since it launched IPTV services a few years ago. AT&T initially launched DVR services in 2007, but the service has quickly progressed. “Our Total Home DVR Phase One service was launched in 2008. It provided the ability to play back recorded programs on any U-Verse connected television in the home. Then we decided to launch Total Home DVR Phase Two. This provides the ability to schedule and delete recordings on any U-Verse connected television in the home. This was launched in July 2009,” he said.
    This progressive DVR strategy is at the heart of its strategy. Hill believes this has given AT&T some interesting competitive advantages in the U.S. pay-TV market. “Over 90 percent of U-Verse customers have a DVR service. The United States average is 33 percent. Also, customers on other platforms can only access DVR services on one television, where as with our service, you can access on connected devices throughout the home,” he said.
    The second phase of Total Home DVR now gives AT&T’s customer base all kinds of flexibility in scheduling, recording and deleting programming throughout the home. “When we introduced Phase Two, customers engaged more in DVR activity. When we introduced the ability to record throughout the house, we saw a 12 percent increase in the number of DVR subscribers recording content. The number of hours of TV people watched when we introduced Total Home DVR Phase One increased by a third compared to before. When we launched the second phase, the average number of hours viewed by a DVR subscriber increased by 70 percent compared to before the Total Home DVR solution. The latest DVR solution has led to a significant increase in consumed content (by our DVR subscriber base),” Hill said.
     In other interesting aspects of consumer behavior, Hill added, “With our DVR strategy, we are seeing about 70 percent of content still consumed live, and one third is coming off the DVR. AT&T provides DVR functionality to all connected televisions in the home. The typical United States home has 3.5 televisions. Over 80 percent of those homes are networked over co-ax.”
    Interestingly, AT&T believes this strategy is having a huge impact on ratings of key prime time programs, which is good news for advertisers. “National primetime programs really benefit from Total Home DVR. For example, Desperate Housewives’ viewership increased 61 percent (on our platform). Prime time shows really benefit from a connected DVR universe in the home. U-Verse customers watch an average of 45 percent of the recordings they create within three days.”
    Liberty Global, which has cable operations throughout the world says, in order to compete better – particularly against satellite – it also needs a more advanced connected home strategy. “The cable environment is an IP environment. We strongly believe we need to follow applications. We are reviewing our set-top box strategy. They need to be able to deal with application suites. We definitely think cable boxes need to be able to connect to IP devices. Increasingly, we need to be able to follow customers (throughout the home),” said Manuel Kohnstam, managing director, public policy and communications, Liberty Global Europe.
    In terms of key challenges facing Liberty going forward, Kohnstam added, “The focus for us going forward is increasing the depth of our video-on-demand (VOD) offering. We also want to improve the ease of discovery of content, search and access anywhere in the home. We need to have a sexier user interface. We are looking at more web integration in terms of content.”

Latest Figures
According to the Broadband Forum, there are now close to 470 million broadband customers globally. A report – prepared for the Forum by industry analysts Point Topic – was also released at the IPTV World Forum last week. The report says that, by year-end 2009, there were more than 33 million IPTV customers, an annual increase of 47 percent. Each quarter was stronger in 2009 than its corresponding 2008 quarter, and fourth quarter posted the strongest growth at 11 percent.
    The report says Asia is pacing the world in terms of broadband and IPTV. It says Asia now accounts for 39 percent of the broadband market and 32 percent of the IPTV market. China passed a major milestone in fourth quarter, now serving more than 100 million broadband subscribers, and holding the number one broadband country spot worldwide. Asia also included the fastest growing major broadband countries in world; Philippines (over 60 percent), India (40+ percent growth) as well as Indonesia and Vietnam. Regarding IPTV, China, S. Korea, Japan and Hong Kong were all in the top ten list of territories, the report said.