The broadcast digital terrestrial television (DTT) set-top box market continues to expand, as countries migrate from standard definition (SD) TV to high definition (HD) programs, and digital video recorders (DVR) become a standard feature.
New products like hybrid web-to-TV set top boxes also will contribute to the long-term growth of DTT STBs pushing revenues to nearly $6 billion by 2014, according to the latest In-Stat market study.
“The bulk of the market value resides in Western Europe and Asia-Pacific with the key growth regions being Latin America and Asia-Pacific,” says Gerry Kaufhold, Principal Analyst at In-Stat.
Sezmi TV will spur moderate growth for HD-DVR STBs in the U.S. market. The Middle East and Africa hold potential but not until the economic situation improves and local governments decide how they will handle subsidizing DTT converter boxes.
Some of the In-Stat market study findings include:
- Europe is embracing High Definition and optional Pay-TV services.
- DVB-T2 will provide a second growth phase for Europe.
- Hybrid Broadcast Broadband services and the UK's YouView approach will increase demand for HD STBs equipped with disk drives and broadband connections.
- Intel is entering the DTT STB market with Metrological's YuiXX Hybrid STB, Amino's Freedom box, Google TV, and others.
- Africa and Latin America will leapfrog directly to MPEG-4 HD and spur long-term growth.
- Semiconductor TAM for all DTT STBs will exceed $500 million in 2014, with approximately 80 percent of the TAM coming from HD boxes.
- Licensing fees are a significant cost of manufacturing HD DTT boxes. By 2014, licensing will account for a higher percentage of the total Bill of Materials (BOM) than Decoders, Tuners or Memory devices.