Monday November 16, 2009 – Shelby Cunningham
Internet connected Digital TVs are making their first big splash in the TV market and DTC is forecasting a rapidly growing market in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific markets.
How these TVs will be used by consumers isn’t entirely clear but they are marketed as a way to pull in Internet video content independent of any gated TV services. The result is a competitive threat to gated TV service providers. What is also unclear is how consumer would manage an ever-increasing growing and fragmented line up of programs.
We assume that the middleware and software whizzes will eventually help consumers from drowning in the sea of unmoored programming and those consumers will want the option to access select video-centric sites on their connected TVs. To that end, DTC estimates that more than 6 million connected IDTVs will ship into these three markets in 2009, tripling to about 18 million units shipped in 2010. Although IDTVs only make up about 4% of total TV shipments in these regions at the moment, they quickly rise in numbers to 33% of all shipments in 2012.
Source: DTC
This fast growth can be attributed to price range and competition amongst suppliers. Connected DTVs are in the upper price range of TVs, which were not so popular during this economic downturn. Competition amongst top suppliers will pull IDTVs down into the popular mid-range pricing which will increase shipments, and consumers will start snatching them off the shelves in greater numbers in 2010.
