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MAY 31, 2006 Broadband is creating new revenue streams. Everyone pays lip-service to the idea that broadband is better for business, beyond just the subscription business for service providers. A new report from Point Topic, "The Consumer BVAS Market," reveals how much better. Worldwide, consumer broadband value-added services (BVAS) revenues were running at an annual rate of $6.9 billion at the beginning of 2005. But that figure increased by 72% during the course of the year, reaching an $11.9 billion annual run rate just 12 months later. Even more impressively, during that period the BVAS revenue increase was steeper than the growth in the number of consumer broadband lines (which increased by 49% to 183 million lines) or total broadband access revenues (which increased by 29% to $54 billion). As a result, at the beginning of this year BVAS was adding 22% to access revenues. This compares to a contribution of 18% at the start of 2005 and 10% at the start of 2004. For the year 2005 as a whole, Point Topic estimated that consumer BVAS revenues were $9.1 billion, compared to access revenues of $47.8 billion. The top value-added services contributions were security, VoIP, online gaming, home networks and music downloads.
As noted in the report, "Whilst security and home networks are support tools that enable the use of broadband, VoIP, gaming and music are all services that need broadband to work effectively. These results show that value-added services revenues are steadily increasing in relative importance, when compared with revenues from the supporting technologies and infrastructure of broadband." |
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