We rarely pass on any pearls of wisdom from Parks Associates, mostly because they are a bit competitive with our own and we don’t always agree with them. But here’s one where we have no axes to grind – it reckons that sales of Internet-connected TVs will soar to 350 million by 2015. Sounds about right when you consider there are about 700 million pay TV homes out there and 1.3 billion TV homes and that it takes around 7 years to replenish all the TVs out there and that there’s already 500 million or more broadband lines, mostly in the same homes as HDTVs.
Parks came into being by interviewing people about their digital home networks in the US, and that’s where it is strong, so this will come out of people expressing an interest in owning web-enabled TVs, Blu-ray players, connected gaming consoles or DVRs including, popular specialist devices like the Roku and Apple TV.
For our money the actual TV designs from Samsung and Sony and the like are the most likely devices to ship in numbers because people will buy them anyway and the price for internet connection will just fall until it’s like a camera in a handset – expected.
‘The market has reached the fourth generation of connected TVs, and all major manufacturers are debuting new models at CES with innovations in content aggregation, apps development, and user interfaces,” said Kurt Scherf, VP, principal analyst, Parks Associates. We must have missed the previous three generations.
“Content options are finally catching up to the hardware innovations, and growing libraries of on-demand movies and TV available are starting to unlock the potential of connected TV devices as multifunction online entertainment and communications platforms.”
He’s right when he says that the presence of these devices will open up opportunities for apps developers including Google, Samsung, and Yahoo! And if Google has its way it will be less of a controlled apps environment and more an open-browser approach.