Map lays out gaping holes in IPTV provision

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 8 Sep 2010 at 10:53

More than seven million people hoping to get their TV service over broadband after the digital switch-over in 2012 will be disappointed, according to figures from Point Topic.

Although IPTV has been touted as a delivery method for television once the analogue signals are switched off, a map (below) from research firm Point Topic shows swathes of the country will be unable to rely on broadband.

The research shows 3.1 million households will rely solely on terrestrial and satellite systems for standard definition services because their connection is unable to cope with high-quality streaming video.

That figure rises to 7.6 million homes for HDTV, which requires more bandwidth to deliver a high-quality service.

“Under 2Mbits/sec you can't reliably stream semi-quality IPTV, although obviously it would be fine for lower quality streams from YouTube and other sites,” said Point Topic CEO Oliver Johnson.

“For HDTV, we took 10Mbits/sec as a minimum as that is where you get a reliable service without and stuttering and buffering problems – although this is coming down as codecs improve.”

Johnson said that although in an ideal world end users could receive HDTV at around 6Mbits/sec, network congestion problems and other issues meant that 10Mbits/sec was a reasonable minimum acceptable rate for a reliable service.

The Point Topic research was undertaken in conjunction with digital TV data specialists Apogee, which suggested around 90,000 homes will be unable to receive either a terrestrial signal or broadband TV and will have to rely on satellite services.

“We now have a more complete picture of the intersection between the alternative delivery systems for linear, digital and interactive TV services and there are significant gaps particularly in broadband roll-out,” said Louise Kavanagh, managing director of Apogee. “Our estimates show that the consumers' choice of what to watch and how will be restricted for up to seven and a half million households.

“The PSB1 and PSB2 signals that carry the traditional channels (BBC 1 through to Channel Five) will be unavailable to many households at the end of 2012 except by satellite.”