The next few years will see a major effort among companies to control entertainment services delivered to television sets. This “battle for the living room” is the subject of a series of new research reports from DFC Intelligence. These reports cover the efforts of content owners, video aggregators, and CE manufacturers to develop an alternative market for distribution of TV shows and movies.
“While PCs, tablets, and smartphones routinely offer online access, the TV, the most important entertainment device in the home, until recently has not been connected to the Internet,” said Michael Goodman, lead analyst of the research. “Going forward, however, a variety of devices such as video game consoles, media players, and Blu-ray players enable the TV to connect to the Internet. In addition, a growing number of connected or smart TVs can connect to the Internet out of the box.”
DFC Intelligence forecasts that the number of devices that connect television sets to the Internet will explode to over 1.5 billion worldwide by 2016, a nearly five-fold increase from where it is today.
In North America alone it is forecasted that by 2016 81 million households will have a connected TV, up from 24 million at the start of 2012. North America, however, only accounts for about 20% of connected TV households and much of the growth will come from exploding global broadband penetration.
A major issue in the connected living room space is which companies will control the hardware devices and more importantly the operating systems that provide interactive services via the television. “In the mobile space we see Apple and Google dominate the delivery of services,” said Michael Goodman. “In comparison, competition in the television market is wide open but companies like Sony and Microsoft are off to a strong start with their built in video game console installed bases and well developed platforms for content delivery.”
In the, Video Game Consoles as Entertainment Hubs Report, DFC Intelligence looks at the potential for systems like the Microsoft Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii and future game systems to act as the primary device to deliver not just games but music, movies and other entertainment services to the living room.
“A service like Xbox LIVE now sees more than 50% of its online usage in non-game related activities such as watching movies from Netflix,” said David Cole. “Especially in North America and Europe, game consoles are a natural way to connect to the Internet and many households already have one or more system.”
