IPTV gear vendors won’t be as hard hit as their network equipment colleagues due to the HD arms race, according to new analysis from Infonetics Research.
In the United States, a fierce battle is raging between service providers delivering IPTV (such as AT&T, Verizon, and SureWest) and cable video providers (such as Time Warner, Comcast, and Cablevision) to increase the number of HD channels. The same race will be heating up in other regions of the world, particularly in Europe and Central and Latin America.
As a result, the market research firm found encoder providers like Harmonic, Tandberg (Ericsson) and Motorola will see a continued uptick in revenue this year.
Service provider spending on IPTV and switched digital video (SDV) equipment grew 48 percent in 2008 from the previous year, hitting $3.9 billion worldwide. The market was up 10 percent sequentially in the final quarter of 2008.In addition to HD, spending was boosted by an increase in channel lineups.
Service providers are expected to increase their spending on IPTV equipment in the double-digit percentages over the next five years, with spending hitting a high of $8.9 billion in 2013. IPTV equipment includes integrated digital headend platforms, VoD and streaming content servers, IP video encoders, IPTV middleware/content delivery platforms, video content protection software, and IP set-top boxes.
Infonetics also found that aggressive pricing on bundled service packages drove healthy growth in IPTV subscriber numbers in EMEA, Asia Pacific and North America in the fourth quarter of 2008.
The number of pure and hybrid IPTV subscribers more than doubled in 2008 to 25.4 million worldwide, and is expected to grow to about 45 million in 2009.
