Video Infrastructure Tops $800 Million

According to Infonetics Research, following annual declines in 2009 and 2010 during the global recession, the video infrastructure market (VOD and streaming content servers and video encoders) grew 6% in 2011 to $803 million. Sequentially (from the third to the fourth quarters), the overall market is up 4%; from the year-ago fourth quarter, the market is up 6%.Infonetics forecasts double-digit percent revenue increases in the global video infrastructure market in 2012, as well as a cumulative $1.9 billion being spent on standard and high definition (SD and HD) MPEG-4 video encoders over the next 5 years, from 2012 to 2016. Huawei leads the global VOD server market in both 4Q11 and for the overall year 2011; Motorola and ZTE are neck-and-neck for global VOD revenue in 4Q11.On the set-top front, in 2011, worldwide set-top box unit shipments grew 13.7% compared to the previous year, while revenue was nearly flat, up less than 1%, to $13.3 billion. Global set-top box unit shipments grew faster (+6.0%) than revenue (+3.8) between the third and fourth quarters of 2011. In overall global STB revenue share, Motorola, Echostar, Pace and Cisco lead, all separated by only a few market share percentage points in 4Q11.Demand continues to accelerate for streaming devices -- such as those made by Apple, Boxee, Roku, Popcorn Hour, D-Link, NETGEAR, Western Digital and TiVo -- with global over-the-top (OTT) media server revenue jumping 38% and unit shipments up 68% in 2011 as more service providers offer streaming video to their subscribers.