Survey Sez 11/15/12

"IPTV is continuing its rapid growth worldwide but some of the more exciting opportunities are only just beginning in the Middle East/Africa and Latin America/Caribbean regions," notes Jose Alvear, senior research analyst at Multimedia Research Group Inc. (MRG). "While the growth in the number of new IPTV service providers has been slowing down because telcos around the world have already deployed IPTV services for a number of years, there are still plenty of new opportunities available to vendors in emerging markets." Other key MRG findings: Vendors that ranked first globally in each product category are Alcatel-Lucent (Access), Harmonic (VHE), Microsoft (VoD and Middleware), Google/Motorola (Set-Top Boxes) and Verimatrix (CP/DRM). Huawei leads in three of the six product categories in Asia Pacific, and it’s gaining traction in Middle East/Africa…Wireless infrastructure equipment revenues stabilized in the third quarter of 2012 reaching only $11.3 billion – a 1-percent decrease from 2Q12 and a 10.3-percent decrease from the same quarter a year ago, according to ABI Research. “There is no question that the RAN market has been squeezed in 2012, although we have seen improvements in the third quarter, being 8-percent down from the 14-percent decrease we saw in the first quarter,” says Aditya Kaul, practice director/Mobile Networks. “Even with the fourth quarter bringing in the traditional Christmas cheer, 2012 will end up 10-percent down at the very least, which is bound to cause market share shifts”…Research from video-streaming and -monetization platform provider Ooyala points to a steady increase in Web-delivered video viewing quarter over quarter as people tune in to TV more frequently on such digital devices as smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, PCs and connected TVs, both in and out of the home. For example, the company says tablet owners spent 71 percent of their total tablet video viewing time watching videos lasting 10 minutes or longer; 30 percent of total tablet viewing time was spent watching content lasting an hour; the amount of time users spent watching live video on gaming consoles more than doubled in 3Q12; and desktop viewers tuned into live video for an average of 40 minutes. Comments Bismarck Lepe, co-founder and president/Products, “For premium content providers, the ability to closely monitor consumption across devices and across an entire network is critical. It’s the only way to have a holistic strategy for optimizing revenue. This requires sophisticated and actionable analytics.”