Euro IPTV grows; Orange burdened by content costs

A few initial first-quarter earnings reports from Europe show that incumbent telcos continue to grow their IPTV customer bases, but in some cases, new business challenges also are developing. For example, France Telecom's Orange, the continent's most successful telco TV operator, saw pay TV base grow but also saw content acquisition costs in its native market have an impact on its quarterly profit.

A brief look at some Q1 IPTV reports from Europe:
--France Telecom's Orange surpassed 2.16 million pay TV subscribers, of which about 1.85 million are on IPTV.
--Swisscom increased its IPTV subscribers by 21,000 to about 139,000 total.
--TeliaSonera now has 509,000 IPTV customers and about 688,000 total pay TV customers.
--Telecom Italia added 36,000 IPTV subscribers to reach 365,000 total.
--Telefonica O2 in the Czech Republic added 15,000 subs to hit 128,000.
--Germany's Deutsche Telekom reached 600,000 IPTV orders, of which about 448,000 are active customers.
--TPSA in Poland added 85,000 pay TV subscribers to reach 198,000 total, roughly 86,000 of which are on IPTV.
--Dutch telco KPN Telecom added 60,000 TV sign-ups for about 835,000 total, which includes IPTV sign-ups.

For more:
- IPTV News has this Orange post
- IPTV News has this Telecom Italia post 
- Broadband TV News has this DT post

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