TORONTO – Bell Canada’s video division experienced its second-best year of growth in its history, adding approximately 200,000 customers during 2005.
That’s a 72% growth rate over 2004. While the official numbers will be announced at tomorrow’s Bell Canada Enterprises Investor’s Day, Bell Video Group vice-president of sales and marketing Pat Button mentioned a few figures during a speech this afternoon at the Canadian Satellite Users Association annual conference: The Digital Broadcasting Summit.
The new 1.7 million figure includes Bell ExpressVu customers, as well as those in about 300 apartment and condominiums now getting Bell digital video over vDSL technology, said Button.
That bit of terrestrially-delivered video (thanks in part to its purchase of Cable VDN and its contracts) is just the first of a huge on-the-ground rollout that Bell plans.
Button added that Bell Video, using IPTV technology, will pass “4.2 million homes by 2008,” he said. The service is already being tested by employees in certain areas and is on track for a commercial launch in 2006. “We want to be the number one television provider by the end of the decade,” he added.
(This could, therefore, be where the $2 billion-plus Bell will be getting in 2006 from the sale of both Bell Globemedia and CGI, which was pondered by cartt.ca.)
Bell Canada has a broadcast distribution undertaking (BDU) license for southern Ontario and Quebec and just as the cablecos are now attacking the voice base of the telcos, so must the telcos go after the urban video base of the cable companies. (Button said that while ExpressVu may have 25% to 40% of the market in some rural areas, it’s only about “five to six percent” penetrated in the 416 area code).
Button also added that, like the term VOIP, Bell will shun calling its terrestrial TV fibre to the node service “IPTV”.
“It’s a 100% secure network,” he explained. “It’s smart pipe (Bell) versus big pipe (cable)… we can carry an unlimited number of channels because we only deliver the one channel being watched at any one time.”
Surf back to cartt.ca Wednesday afternoon as we attend the BCE investor’s conference in the morning to get the lowdown on what the company has planned.
