[Satellite TODAY Insider 02-04-11] Satellite set-top box shipments in 2010 declined 8 percent in North America and Western Europe, according to research issued Feb. 2 by In-Stat.
    In the report, In-Stat said the saturation point for satellite pay-TV has been reached. “The decline in North America shipments moving forward will be a result of a movement to residential media servers, first by DirecTV and then by other providers. The move to IP clients will impact Europe as well, though multi-room penetration is much lower, so the impact on shipments will be lower. Markets like Latin America and the Mid-East/Africa regions will see the highest growth percentages, as rising household incomes and lower cost pay-TV packages will enable more satellite pay-TV subscriber growth in those markets,” In-Stat Principle Analyst and report author Michelle Abraham said.
    Pace CEO Neil Gaydon explained the changing dynamic of the market to Satellite TODAY Insider and admitted that the set-top box industry is undergoing an evolution. “We see operators will want more advanced products, offering consumers more control of a wider set of content around the home, increasing the requirement for managed set-top boxes.    We need a new term to replace set-top box, which reflects the complexity of advanced devices. It is used to refer to everything from a very basic type box all the way through to HD PVR with broadband controlling the whole home in an IP network. That is not a set-top box, it is a media gateway,” he said.    
    In-Stat also forecasts that the worldwide satellite HD box market will show growth each year through 2014, with the exception of 2011, as a result of DirecTV’s use of IP set-top boxes. The firm has also produced recent research showing the PVR market set to report record shipment levels in 2010.
    “Worldwide PVR revenues in 2010 are projected to increase significantly, rising by over $1.2 billion in comparison to 2009 revenues. This increase is being fueled by consumer demand to time-shift television programming, meaning pay-TV service providers are deploying millions of new PVR products each year. We forecast that annual PVR product unit shipments will surpass 50 million by 2014,” Abraham said.

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