It seems that the world is steadily falling in love with triple play bundles (also known as 3P - taking broadband, home phone and digital TV services from a single provider) as a UK-based research specialist predicts a dramatic increase in 3P subscribers.

In more detail, Digital TV Research, forecasted that more than a quarter of homes (387m) globally would subscribe to a 3P bundle by 2016, which was a six year long 7 per cent increase from the number registered in 2010 - 96m.

It has also been added that cable operators which provided superfast broadband (for example Virgin Media) would lead the pack with roughly 258m users while DSL fibre broadband providers would follow its footsteps with 129m subscribers.

According to the research, this is partly because an array of cable providers has been offering bundles for much longer than DSL ISPs.

2P bundling (broadband and digital TV) is also going to be on the rise, according to the analyst, reaching 80m customers or 5.4 per cent by 2016.

The author of the report, Simon Murray, said:

"Rivalry for pay TV and broadband subscribers has never been so fierce - and it's going to get even more competitive. Operators are pushing their bundled packages hard to attract new subscribers and to retain existing ones.

"The effect of all of this competition is reasonably-priced bundles, which increases overall [blended] ARPU for operators but lowers revenues from the component parts: TV, broadband and telephony.

"So operators will (and have already started to) reduce TV channel choice (sometimes to just what is offered on DTT) and will be more reluctant to pay carriage fees for basic channels. This will impact channels revenue streams. Furthermore, operators are providing faster broadband speeds as standard."

It has also been added that most 3P subscriptions will come from the Asia Pacific region.