China Telecom moves toward 1 million IPTV customers

China's telecom industry is currently undergoing an extreme makeover that will result in fewer large carriers and a fully converged industry in which all carriers offer mobile and fixed line options to some degree. So, perhaps the country's emerging IPTV market has been somewhat overlooked. China Telecom, the nation's largest wireline telco, just reported that its had more than 940,000 IPTV customers as of May this year.

The service is available mostly in cities such as Shanghai, Jiangxu, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Shaanxi. The company launched IPTV a few years ago, but growth has moved at a modest pace thus far. China Telecom reportedly has recently been shopping for IPTV set-top boxes, looking to put in an order for as many as 574,000. Alternative wireline operator China Netcom also has offered IPTV services for a number of years, and Hong Kong's PCCW was among the first telco in the world to have success with IPTV.

For more:
- check out this coverage [1] at China Knowledge

Related articles:
China experienced some IPTV growing pains early on China report [2]
China Netcom rolled out IPTV with vendor ZTE China Netcom report [3]