Market Trends

by NSR

The first few pages of the trade publication Digital Ship offers a glimpse of what is on the radar screen of many satcom service providers in the maritime market. In the last few months, vendors have made many announcements about new products and customer wins for either C- and Ku-band VSAT solutions or L-band satellite broadband services. The recent launch of FleetBroadband (the Inmarsat-at-sea version of BGAN), the addition of Iridium’s OpenPort (which reaches the 128 Kbps broadband threshold), and the continued push of VSATs from fixed satellite services (FSS) operators all attest to an increase in satellite supply and diversity for maritime platforms.

Annual revenues from the global mobile market will top US$1.03 trillion by 2013, when the number of subscriptions worldwide will have risen to more than 5.3 billion, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. From end-2007 to end-2013, the global mobile market will see huge growth, increasing in size by over half (56%), according to the latest edition of Informa Telecoms & Media’s Global Mobile Forecasts to 2013. It took over 20 years to reach 3 billion subscriptions, but another 1.9 billion net additions are forecast in just six years, with the global total nudging past the 5-billion milestone in 2011. With this extraordinary growth, total annual revenues derived from mobile operators will grow by over a third (33.9%), jumping from US$769bn in 2007 to US$1.03 trillion six years later.

 by Bruce Elbert, President, Application Strategy, Inc. and Michelle Elbert

The satellite broadband sector has gained a lot of ground as there are now approximately over one million individual users worldwide. These are families and small businesses who subscribe to service providers that address the individual consumer by providing a dish, modem and access to the Internet. With the familiar asymmetrical arrangement, these services deliver download speeds between 200 kbps and perhaps 1 Mbps; and upload speeds that hover at 100 kbps as a peak rate. Subscribers generally choose satellite broadband because they cannot obtain one of the more common terrestrial broadband services, namely DSL and cable modem. I encounter many who employ satellite broadband and they uniformly find it reasonably good and a worthwhile expenditure, since they need "always on" high speed access to the Internet for a combination of work and pleasure.

Given the sorry recent history of CEOs misrepresenting the health and future of their companies, it would be understandable if recent statements from individuals ranging from Romain Bausch of SES, Guiliano Beretta of Eutelsat and David McGlade of Intelsat, that their companies had yet to see any substantial impact from the major global economic downturn were to be taken with a grain of salt. Yet, NSR has recently completed its annual data collection effort of television channels and feeds carried on commercial satellites, and the actual results truly do support these assertions.

by Virgil Labrador, Editor-in-Chief

Beginning with what seemed like another promising year for the satellite industry, 2008 saw the world’s economy go down in a spiralling downturn that brought us into the world’s worst recession since the Great Depression in 1933. They don’t have a name for this recession yet (remember the "Oil Crisis" of the 70s and the "Telecom and Dot.com Bust" of the late 90s/early 2000s). But then again we are just in the beginning of this one. No one can really foretell what lies ahead, but it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better.

by NSR

More than three years ago, NSR first stated in its Broadband Satellite Markets studies that government efforts to require universal access to broadband services would be a boon to the European market for broadband satellite Internet access services. Such initiatives never come about as quickly as service providers would like, but it now appears that Europe is truly setting itself upon this path.

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré said  that worldwide mobile cellular subscribers are likely to reach the 4 billion mark before the end of this year.  Dr Touré was speaking at the high-level events on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in New York, where he also participated in UN Private Sector Forums addressing the global food crisis and the role of technological innovation in meeting the MDGs.

by Virgil Labrador, Editor-in-Chief

With the global financial downturn, satellite companies are always looking for new and emerging markets to sell their products and services.  But with the increasingly global nature of the world’s economies, there are fewer markets left to explore.

Worldwide IPTV Service Revenue Will Reach $19 Billion in 2012

Worldwide subscriptions to internet Protocol television (IPTV) services are on pace to reach 19.6 million subscribers in 2008, a 64.1 per cent increase from 12 million subscribers in 2007, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide IPTV revenue is projected to total $4.5 billion in 2008, a 93.5 per cent increase from 2007 revenue of $2.3 billion.

A new generation of satellites, and spectrum assigned to mobile satellite services, will play a prominent role in the next major development in television and radio broadcasting.