100 Million Households Will Be Using Hybrid Services by 2016

New In-Stat research forecasts that 100 million households will actively use a hybrid service delivered to their TV set by 2016.

With TV programme now available on the internet, and the internet on mobile devices, and also the internet now available via your TV set, software engineers and smart TV producers are finding ways to create new “hybrid” services that bring all of this together.

“The next step in the viewing experience will be for TV sets and set top boxes to permit all of the traditional TV-related services, which is then expanded and enhanced by bringing in content from the Internet, or from Internet-like web services that provide a ‘walled garden’ of authorised content and on-screen features,” says Gerry Kaufhold, Research Director.

“In tandem with web-based content coming to TV screens are TV apps that use tablets or smartphones. We expect nearly 80 million households will be actively using TV apps provided by their service provider by 2016. These new hybrid approaches provide an excellent growth opportunity for TV producers.”

Additional research findings from In-Stat’s recent report, The New TV Experience: TV Apps and Hybrid Services, includes the following:

• Personal computers are still the primary display device for viewing videos from the Internet.
• North America is the early leader for hybrid TV households, but the UK, France, and Germany are coming on strong, and most of Europe will have hybrid services by 2016.
• Europe’s Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV (HbbTV) service will begin to gain dominance by late 2013.
• Europe will become the worldwide center of excellence for long-term development of hybrid TV services.