You may be familiar with the story already but if you’re not here’s a synopsis: the world’s biggest satellite company, DirecTV, with almost 30 million customers across the US and Latin America, announced that it was launching a “premium VOD” service called ‘Home Premiere’ in April which would let subscribers watch a movie on their television sets just 60 days after its theatrical release.

A recently published article on Videonet explores whether more telcos should look at over-the-top as an alternative approach to delivering or expanding video services, thus removing or reducing their reliance on traditional IPTV. That is the view of Andrew Ladbrook, Analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, who told the Connected Home World Summit on Tuesday that this is one of the opportunities created by the proliferation of connected TV devices, and a possibility that is not talked about enough.

Informa Telecoms & Media’s recent ‘Congestion Up Ahead?’ report into internet-based TV entertainment forecasts that some 380m people around the world will be watching online video carried ‘over the top’ (OTT) of a broadband link on connected devices such as a TV, game console or set-top box (STB) by 2015.
This is more than twice the 163m subscribers Informa expects to be using a guaranteed-bandwidth IPTV (internet protocol TV) connection by that time. In some countries the difference will be even greater – in the UK for instance the number of OTT viewers already exceeds those using IPTV. According to Informa, by 2015 the UK IPTV viewership will have declined to 3.6m while OTT grows to 27m.