“Phenomenal growth” to drive 1.7BN OTT device shipments

Joseph O'Halloran | 10-12-2013

The extent to which over-the-top (OTT) services have changed the TV landscape has been revealed in the latest research by IHS.

According to the company’s Consumer Electronics Topical Report, more than 1.7 billion devices capable of accessing OTT content as delivered by the likes of Netflix and Hulu are set to ship by the end of 2013. This will represent a 20% rise in shipments of OTT-capable devices and equates to enough OTT systems to accommodate almost one out of every four people on the planet.

The analyst also predicts that the market will grow another 20% in 2014 to result in around 2.67 billion units by 2017 by when total shipments will have expanded by 86% from that in 2012. This, says IHS, is phenomenal growth by any measurement.

“Content owners, operators and consumers all are driving the proliferation of the OTT model,” said Jordan Selburn, senior principal analyst, consumer platforms. “Content owners want to expand the market for the films, music and videos they own. Meanwhile, operators wish to use OTT in order to add value to their services and keep subscribers from cancelling TV subscriptions in favour of purely broadband connections — preventing [cord-cutting]. Consumers, for their part, desire access to a wide variety of media at the time and place of their own choosing.”

IHS calculates that the majority of OTT devices — including set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, connected TVs, game players, digital media adapters like Apple TV or Roku and media tablets — are either PCs or smartphones, which together accounted for 836 million of the 1.43 billion OTT-capable devices shipped in 2012. It adds that even discounting PCs and smartphones, the rest of the OTT device market is extremely large and growing at an accelerating rate and expects approximately 480 million of such non-PC, non-smartphone devices to ship in 2013, up 30% year-on-year.