In the not unrelated IPTV market Dailyiptv has a useful article by David Cotriss for those who care about what is the number one VoIP market: Europe or the US (with apologies to the 4 billion plus living in the Asia Pacific region). The article notes Europe is number one by a significant margin in terms of box deployments but for revenue the gap is much smaller.
Richard Broughton, an analyst at Screen Digest, puts Europe's lead down to the less competitive US market place and the maturity of the cable television network in the US. As a result U.S. telcos are choosing to go for full pay-TV services Broughton tells Dailyiptv. "In Europe, IPTV services tend toward the budget end of the market. As such, they are a little easier to roll out en masse. In the U.S., the telcos are competing directly with the major pay-TV operators, and as such have had to be much more careful when considering how they roll out the services, what sort of content is available and how they market their offers."
"In terms of those IPTV customers who actually use the IPTV box, Europe will have roughly four times as many IPTV customers as the U.S. by the end of the year. In terms of deployed boxes, Europe leads by even more - roughly double the number again. However, revenue wise, the gap narrows, with the U.S. looking to have made roughly half a billion euros (about $700 million) from IPTV subscriptions in 2007. Europe's figure is only two and a half times this." Report [1]
Links:
[1] http://www.dailyiptv.com/features/no-1-in-iptv-103007/