O2 greenlights U.K. IPTV plans

After a successful rollout of IPTV services in the Czech Republic, O2 said it plans to launch a similar offering in the UK next year. O2 launched an IPTV service for Czech users last September and has since attracted some 70,000 subscribers. Some analysts chalk up O2's success in that country to its rights to broadcast ice hockey games. As we've noted in recent weeks, the UK market has been a difficult one for new video service providers.

As recently as May, Virgin promised to be on air next year in its ambitious triple play to cover the spots in the U.K. where cable wasn't, but now the company put those plans off until at least 2009. BT recently announced it had 60,000 customers for its video product--a long way short of its promised hundreds of thousand by the end of 2007 and nowhere near the two- to three-million customers BT hope to have in the medium term. France Telecom's Orange network has also gone very shy as of late about its very public plan to have a TV service in the U.K. by Christmas. Finally, the metrics for Tiscali's Homechoice aren't stellar either: customer numbers have fallen 10,000 to a modest 30,000 over the last year.

For more on O2's designs for the UK market:
- read this article from The Register

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