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Residential networking needed for IPTV success?
IPTV faces an uphill struggle to penetrate the consumer market if it remains a stand-alone pay-TV service, according to ‘Dataquest Insight: IPTV in and Around the Home’, a new report from Gartner Inc. The company reckons that in an industry dominated by incumbent cable and satellite operators, as well as traditional terrestrial free-to-air network broadcasters, IPTV operators need to entice consumers with a range of bundled services, including IP-based home networking, offering a one-stop, whole-home solution.
“Although today's newest, leading-edge PC-based home networks are able to deliver high-quality video and audio around the home, most consumer electronic products, such as TVs, digital set-top boxes (STBs), and DVD players, remain stubbornly isolated in their ability to communicate with other equipment over a wide area,” argues Paul O'Donovan, principal research analyst at Gartner. “As the Internet increasingly becomes a source for video consumption by a wider family audience, there is a need to address this issue and expand home-networking options.”
Gartner believes that the STB is well-placed to become a core component of an entertainment-based home network, particularly in countries with a high number of cable TV homes (penetration of 40% or above) or countries with a large number of homes passed by cable TV.
Gartner expects home networking to become commonplace in consumer electronic hardware in the next five to six years, predicting that whether consumers need the functionality or not, it will be embedded in many products.
Reaching a rather different conclusion about home networking is ABI Research. In that company’s analysis, ‘Home Networking Forecast’, it is suggested that, in fact, the worldwide home networking market is entering a phase of slowing growth. ABI calculates that many consumers have already purchased a home networking device, and other pertinent factors include continued pricing pressure and a lack of strong demand from consumers wishing to upgrade to newer technologies. One category, however, that will see continued growth through the next five years will be consumer network storage, which ABI Research estimates at being worth something under US$400mn worldwide today but growing to just over US$1.4bn worldwide by 2013.
John Williamson
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