OTT and Multiscreen TV Drive Spending on Broadcast and Streaming Video Equipment

Campbell, Calif., June 4, 2014—Market research firm Infonetics Research released excerpts from its latest Broadcast and Streaming Video Equipment and Pay TV Subscribers report, which tracks pay-TV subscribers and video equipment sold to telco IPTV, cable, and satellite TV providers.

"We are very early in a long-term transition to software-based and SDN-controlled video processing, but we believe the shift will result in increased spending on both multiscreen encoders and content delivery network equipment, as pay-TV and over-the-top (OTT) providers begin purchasing these platforms to more efficiently process and distribute video content,” says Jeff Heynen, principal analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research.

Adds Heynen: “Multiscreen and multi-format video give providers the flexibility to deliver video to any end device from nearly every point in their network.”

Highlights of the report include:

  • The overall broadcast and streaming video equipment market grew 5.6% worldwide in 2013, to US$ 1.6 billion, as spending on content delivery networks (CDNs) increased while spending on contribution encoders and video-on-demand (VOD) playout servers decreased
  • Infonetics forecasts the total market to top US$ 2.5 billion by 2018
  • CDN platforms are evolving to support an increasing number of over-the-top (OTT) formats such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Microsoft Smooth Streaming
  • Two of the strongest growing segments in the broadcast and streaming video market are CDN edge servers, which Infonetics expects to grow at a healthy 17% CAGR from 2013 to 2018, and multiscreen broadcast encoders, growing at an 8% CAGR
  • Pay-TV providers are using a mix of platforms, from GPU-based devices to software only, to create massive and distributed encoding horsepower in the cloud—all managed centrally via software-defined networking (SDN) controllers
  • Harmonic continues to lead the global broadcast and streaming video equipment market, although its revenue share decreased about one point while some competitors gained in 2013.

Infonetics’ biannual broadcast and streaming video report provides worldwide and regional market size, forecasts through 2018, analysis, and trends for telco IPTV, cable video, and satellite video broadcast and streaming video equipment and pay-TV subscribers. Equipment tracked: encoders, transcoders, and IRDs; VOD playout servers; and video CDN equipment (CDN edge servers, ABR origin and packaging servers). Vendors tracked: Alcatel-Lucent, Anevia, Arris, Ateme, Broadpeak, Cisco, Concurrent, Edgeware, Elemental, Envivio, Ericsson, Harmonic, Huawei, Imagine Communications, RGB Networks, Thomson, XOR Media, ZTE, and others. To buy the report, contact Infonetics: http://www.infonetics.com/contact.asp.