Infonetics has increased its long-term forecast for the overall video infrastructure market to $1.1 billion by 2016, as operators worldwide migrate to MPEG-4 HD encoders to support higher picture quality using less bandwidth and as multi-screen services take off.
“Operators are being extremely cautious with their video infrastructure spending right now, looking to sweat their assets as much as they can knowing that a spending spree looms on the horizon to support more unicast and multi-screen services, including RS-DVR, start-over, look-back, and streaming delivery to mobile devices,” said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband access and pay-TV at Infonetics Research, in a statement.
“We expect a noticeable jump in video equipment spending in 2013.”
For the quarter, VOD and encoder equipment revenue fell 3% in 3Q12 from 2Q12, with all regions declining by single digits.
Following two consecutive quarters of declines, spending on VOD and streaming content servers grew 1.8% in 3Q12. Infonetics forecasts the number of IPTV subscribers to nearly double between 2012 and 2016, from 83 million to 165 million worldwide.
