In-Stat analyst Michelle Abraham says that nearly all of the major cable providers are building out their network to support IPTV, which is good news for the IPTV set-top box (STB) sector. In-Stat predicts that unit sales of IPTV STBs will increase from last year's 3 million to 27 million units in 2010. Despite Cisco's November acquisition of STB-maker Scientific Atlanta for $6.9 billion, the IPTV STB sector still has no clear leader, Abraham said.
ABI Research's Michael Arden says he expects networking vendors like Hewlett-Packard, Nortel and Lucent to move aggressively into the IPTV STB sector since they each already have agreements with various smaller STB players and acquisitions seem likely. However, the IPTV STB market may be short-lived, since television makers like Sony are already talking about embedding STB functionality into their sets.
For more on the IPTV STB market:
- see this article from eCommerce Times