The U.K. currently has one of the smallest numbers of IPTV subscribers in Western Europe, with only 75,000 subscribers predicted in 2006. Although this is set to increase fairly rapidly to reach 1.9 million by 2010, with the introduction of services such as BT's BT Vision this autumn, Gartner predicts that the U.K. will remain a weaker prospect for IPTV. This is mainly due to the existing Pay TV landscape and dominance of Sky TV.

Germany has historically been a challenging market with low potential for pay TV, due to the large number of fairly high quality free-to air-channels. Gartner estimates that only 10% of households in Germany today pay for premium TV, a milestone that took 15 years to achieve, and was largely driven by consumers' willingness to pay to watch football.

However, the market is on the brink of change, as illustrated by recent announcements from Deutsche Telecom, with both Premiere and Microsoft. Gartner estimates that the number of households subscribing to IPTV will reach 47,000 this year and grow to 2.8 million by 2010, generating revenues of '465 million.