Switezerland’s Swisscom has just launched their new Bluewin IPTV service, offering over 100 television channels and more than 70 radio stations.

Swisscom says customers of their high-speed Internet connections can now watch and record those stations through its $24-a-month Bluewin TV service. They can also have video on demand, but this costs a little extra.

Regarding the delayed launch of the service, Swisscom spokesman Christian Neuhaus said, “We wanted to offer a mature service, so we worked on it for another year.”

France, Spain, Italy and Britain already have similar IPTV services. Unfortunately the service is not offering HD content as it would require at least 10 times the bandwidth.

IPTV is heating up woldwide with British Telecommunication’s launch of BT Vision, and IPTV subscribers are expected to reach 53 million by 2009 worldwide.

According to the Global IPTV Market Analysis (2006-2010), there will be around 53 million IPTV subscribers worldwide by 2009. The report also forecasts the worldwide IPTV Service Revenue to reach U.S $38 billion by 2009, with the biggest markets being the Americas and Western Europe.

The IPTV market will face the most resistance in the U.S. “due to high existing pay-TV penetration,” and IPTV will face stiff price and service competition from cable and satellite operators.

BT (British Telecommunications) has announced the launch of its new next-generation TV-via-broadband service BT Vision which is due to launch in autumn 2006.

The deal marks the conclusion of the company’s four new video-on-demand deals and was made in collaboration with Entertainment Rights – a media group that specialises in the ownership of children and family programming brands.

Dan Marks, BT Vision CEO, said: “We are delighted to have concluded these deals which ensure that we are able to offer a wide range of films and TV programming to our customers.

“We look forward to working with these leading independent producers and distributors to develop on-demand opportunities and additional revenue streams for their programming.”