Media Tablet: King among Internet-Enabled Consumer Electronics
New York – iSuppli, a market research firm focused on the electronics value chain, recently released a report titled Serving up a Household of Content: Media Servers in CE 3.0 Era, which analyzes the trends in the home media serving devices space and forecasts its growth by 2015.
According to the report, the number of media-serving home systems is expected to grow to more than 600 million by 2015, up from 200 million in 2010. Media tablets such as the iPad will be the fastest growing segment in the space – they are expected to ship more than 300 million devices in 2015, triple the size of the next largest server segment, internet-enabled set-top boxes.
Internet-enabled consumer electronics devices are those that enable users to connect to the Internet in the home. Examples of these devices include TVs, Blu-ray players, game consoles, set-top boxes, digital media adapters, and media tablets. Excluded from this category are some devices that can connect to the Internet but that are tracked separately as data processing and wireless communications equipment – for example PCs and smart phones. The report by iSuppli includes media tablets within the Internet-enabled consumer electronics category given the key role they are playing in the connected home market.
iSuppli reported that the top Internet-enabled consumer electronics last year were game consoles and TVs according to the unit shipments for each device. This year, however, media tablets are likely to grab the top spot with a 214% increase in shipments from last year.
Other independent research providers offering insights in the consumer electronics space include ABI Research, NPD Group, and IDC.