CenturyLink lights Prism IPTV service over its Seattle-area 1 GBps network

Prism TV is now available to some residents and businesses in a number of Seattle neighborhoods, including West Seattle, Ballard, Beacon Hill, Central District, Capitol Hill, Mount Baker and Green Lake. 

Beginning in mid-2014, CenturyLink started rolling out 1 Gbps FTTH broadband to residential and business customers throughout a number of Seattle neighborhoods.

Since launching the 1 Gbps FTTH service in 2014, it is now available to over 100,000 homes and 5,500 business locations in the Seattle area. It has been making additional investments in middleware and striking arrangements with content owners to support the IPTV service.

IPTV and 1 Gbps broadband services have become emerging new revenue sources for CenturyLink.

During the , CenturyLink added about 8,400 Prism TV customers and launched service in three other markets -- including ,  and -- ending the quarter with a total of 2.6 million addressable homes. 

Glen Post, CEO of CenturyLink, said during the second quarter earnings call that the company plans to increase IPTV penetration to additional homes and introducing a new OTT video service by the end of the year.

"We added a total of 175,000 addressable homes in the second quarter, ending the quarter with over 2.6 million Prism TV addressable households," Post said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. "We anticipate expanding Prism TV service to approximately 250,000 additional households during the remainder of 2015 and to reach more than 2.8 million total Prism TV addressable homes by year end."

Although he recognizes that it has to pay higher programming costs than established cable providers like Comcast (), are higher for Prism TV, Post is confident that the company's bet on IPTV is paying off.

He said that 52 percent of the Prism IPTV customers are new CenturyLink, while "57% are triple play customers and about 97% of those customers have a high-speed data connection."

Post added that "those are profitable customers for us and we're pleased to get them -- we're working hard on the programming costs as our whole industry is, we think it's really an area that we have to change over time."

On the FTTH end, the service provider ended the quarter connecting 600,000 homes in 16 markets with 1 Gbps speed connections.

CenturyLink has set an ambitious target to expand 1 Gbps service to nearly 700,000 homes by the end of 2015 with plans to extend service into other unnamed markets.