Over 47 million homes now receive digital satellite signals

The Broadband Forum announced the latest IPTV and broadband statistics, showing that the North American IPTV market has more than doubled in size in 2008 — with growth of 113 percent despite the global economic downturn.

The report, prepared for the Forum by industry analysts Point Topic also showed a very healthy 19 percent growth of IPTV inside the last quarter, well ahead of other IPTV-focused regions South and East Asia and Latin America, whose last quarter growth both showed 12 percent.

Teal Group Corp. announced at Satellite 2009 show, March 27 its revised figures for the Worldwide Mission Model survey of future space payloads.  The study encompasses 2,033 payloads proposed through 2009-2028.

Germany had a total of 37.67 million analog and digital TV homes by the end of 2008. With 16.2 million households, satellite reached 43% of all German households, while 18.45 million households or 49% watched television via cable in 2008. The terrestrial television DVB-T had 2.75 million share of seven percent, followed by IPTV with 270.000 households and a share of one percent. These were the results of the latest Satellite Monitor, conducted annually on behalf of SES ASTRA.The methodology and the results are controlled by independent institutes.

The Dell’Oro Group reported that the IPTV subscriber base grew by 3.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2008 to reach 23 million subscribers at the end of last year, nearly double the number at the end of 2007. While Europe, Middle East, and Africa remained the largest market for unit shipments of IPTV set-top boxes, North America drove the market’s revenue growth in the fourth quarter as AT&T and Verizon continued to aggressively promote their television services.

by NSR

Annual revenues from the global mobile market will top US$1.03 trillion by 2013, when the number of subscriptions worldwide will have risen to more than 5.3 billion, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. From end-2007 to end-2013, the global mobile market will see huge growth, increasing in size by over half (56%), according to the latest edition of Informa Telecoms & Media’s Global Mobile Forecasts to 2013.

The first few pages of the trade publication Digital Ship offers a glimpse of what is on the radar screen of many satcom service providers in the maritime market. In the last few months, vendors have made many announcements about new products and customer wins for either C- and Ku-band VSAT solutions or L-band satellite broadband services.

The satellite broadband sector has gained a lot of ground as there are now approximately over one million individual users worldwide. These are families and small businesses who subscribe to service providers that address the individual consumer by providing a dish, modem and access to the Internet. With the familiar asymmetrical arrangement, these services deliver download speeds between 200 kbps and perhaps 1 Mbps; and upload speeds that hover at 100 kbps as a peak rate.

The current global economic turmoil is having an effect on Asia, but a brief review of history shows that Asia will weather the storm better than other regions and will in fact benefit in several ways from this financial crisis--as well as have a faster rebound.

Three of the satellite based businesses which show continued regional growth are; television broadcasting services (DBS/DTH), machine–to–machine (M-M) services for tracking and monitoring high value assets, and off-shore/remote communication services supporting the oil & gas industry.