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Viodi View Newsletter - July 20th, 2005
Consumer Tidbits from Parks & Associates
By Ken Pyle (ken.pyle@viodi.com), Viodi, LLC
[Note: The following is a brief summary of the Parks and Associates Experts Analyze the Digital Living Landscape. I highly recommend obtaining the proceedings from this conference to get the full breadth and depth of their research.]
At last week's Parks and Associates’ Experts Analyze the Digital Living Landscape conference,Parks and Associates’ analysts, Kurt Scherf, Harry Wang and Michael Cai, used results from their primary research to illuminate what consumers want from service providers. Scherf has the common sense that one would expect from someone with roots from Iowa and, as such, his presentations and those of his colleagues are not laced with hyperbole, but are tempered with the reality of the challenges of making technology easy to use for the average consumer.
Scherf pointed out that price reductions are working for telcos with regards to picking up broadband market share. Price will be even more important in attracting new customers who are more price sensitive. For instance, 54% of broadband intenders plan on subscribing to the the telcos’ offering versus 29% who profess that they will go with their cable operator. Still, cable is enjoying $40 to $42 average revenue per month per broadband user versus $30 to $33 for telcos.
The churn for cable operators has been lower at 2% per month versus 3% for telcos. Customers who drop cable tend to do so for price, while customers who drop telco/DSL service do so to get higher speeds. Reliability was the third most cited reason for why people churned. SureWest Broadband was held up as an example of the right way to implement Fiber to the Premise.
With regards to FTTP, Scherf made the point that Verizon is a much better position to deploy FTTP, as 59% of their plant is aerial; all of the other baby bells have 31% or less aerial plant. In general, the cost of an aerial drop is much less than an underground drop. Still, it will cost Verizon $25 Billion to build out their FTTP network. It was suggested Verizon is serious about this effort and will pass 3 million homes by the end of 2005.
Because of the challenges and the time consuming nature of what essentially amounts to the construction of a new network, Michael Cai pointed out that broadcast satellite will continue to play a key role in the major telcos’ plans. Bell South, Verizon and SBC have deployed over 1 Million subscribers in the last year. Cai believes that telcos’ satellite partnerships are going to be important for the long-term, as well.
Interestingly, Parks & Associates 2005 survey of 2,084 households indicates that people who have satellite television service pay significantly more for their combination of video, Internet, telephone and mobile telephone than any other segment. The satellite households pay on average $261 per month vs. $217 per month for the next closest segment, the digital cable households.
On-demand content is one way cable operators and telcos will be able to lure subscribers to their service. “On-demand is becoming a critical differentiator”, said Kurt Scherf. He suggested that as telcos form relationships with CinemaNow, Movielink, Akimbo, etc. 2Wire, with their combination DVR/Satellite Receiver/Net-top, could be really well positioned.
The multi-room DVR, which the 2Wire set-top provides, is going to be critical going forward. Scherf said that, even in households with just two people, people aren’t watching the same television at the same time as often as they did in the past. There will be a need for serving multiple streams at one time. DVR recording a third or fourth channel will be a reality in many households.
Scherf suggested that telcos look at advertising revenues and should try to leverage their IPTV systems. His comment reminded me of a comment that Jeff Weber of SBC made at the IP Video @ Supercomm conference when he implied that their huge Yellow Pages operations will play a big part in their IPTV plans.
Scherf also thinks that having local content will be critical for telcos in differentiating their deployments. The telcos have to think creatively about how they can use on-demand and local content to increase ARPU in the face of continued and challenging competition.
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Network PVRs Are Desired, But Operators Have Doubts