"[W]hile IPTV is just getting off the ground in the United States, European and Asian carriers have already built a substantial base of television customers," notes the Associated Press. "By the end of 2006, the number of IPTV subscribers in Europe is expected to reach 3.3 million, up from less than a million a year earlier."

American telcos have just started significant deployments and the totals reflect that: AT&T has just a few thousand IPTV subscribers, and while Verizon has half-a-million Fios customers, only 118,000 of them have FiosTV. A recent study predicted that phone companies will have less than 1% of TV subscribers by the end of 2006 and only 6% by the end of 2009.