Subscribers to Orange’s French three-screen TV offering have been watching trial shows more on mobile than via other available media. The telco’s Rewind TV service offers TV programming to computers, over broadband IPTV to the lounge and to mobile phones. “One interesting thing we have seen in the past year, we tested a French soap, is that people watch more on mobile than on normal television,” Herve Payan, Orange’s SVP for content services, told an otherwise low-key future-of-TV panel at Mipcom in Cannes. The soap is available for on-demand catch-up viewing a day after it’s broadcast on TV, with most Rewind customers electing to catch up with the 24-minute episodes on their handsets rather than on the sofa.

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Payan reiterated Orange’s previously whispered intention to launch its long-awaited UK IPTV service before the end of this year. The telco started an IPTV service in France in 2003 and has since rolled out to Poland and Spain; it launched a sports news TV channel last month and today announced a million IPTV subscribers across the continent. It has 10 million broadband customers across Europe and six million in France.