Tiburon, Calif.—July 14, 2005—Consumer electronics
and semiconductor companies are playing their own version of “Survivor,”
slugging it out for the grand prize: the living room. Companies are
competing to capture the technology that controls the pixel in the advanced
television (ATV) market. After eight months of research, Jon Peddie
Research has just released its study, “JPR Special Report: Advanced
Televisions,” focusing on the players, technologies, and market conditions
that affect the future of digital television. With only five companies
controlling 70% of the total ATV semiconductor revenue in 2004 and no
one providing a true single-chip solution from tuner to LVDS for digital
TV, it’s no wonder that competition and collaboration are heating up
to become the dominant player in a market that is anticipated to grow
at a compound annual growth rate of 37% from 2005 to $1.9 billion in
2009.
“JPR Special Report: Advanced Televisions”
explores current semiconductor technology and the 30-and-growing number
of technology companies both large and small that are developing products
for the advanced television market. Analyst Henry Choy points out that
while few companies themselves own all the building blocks from tuner
to LVDS, the question remains whether a single silicon TV chip solution
is actually viable. Indeed such single chip integration could swing
domination of the market in the direction of a key player. The companies
competing in this market come from the video processor, where scaling,
de-interlacing, and video noise reduction arekey, MPEG-based companies
where MPEG decompression hardware and software are key, and video-decoding
companies where analog expertise is important.
“The complexities of today’s
TV have grown to a point where no single television manufacturer can
keep up with market forces and technology advances to remain competitive
with internal semiconductor solutions and manufacturing lines,”
says Henry Choy.
The study examines which companies will be impacted in the move to
digital televison. In the current analog world of TVs, traditional market
leaders such as Genesis, Pixelworks, and Trident Microsystems are at
a clear advantage, but they face a major challenge in the transition
to digital broadcasting with MPEG-2 hardware and software since none
of the three leaders currently has major design wins with digital TV
platforms using their own solutions. While the low-end TV market is
a free-for-all with brutal price pressure and many competitors grabbing
a limited number of design wins, the digital television segment offers
significant growth potential stimulated by the inclusion of ATSC (Advanced
Television Systems Committee) tuners in the U.S. and a government mandated
elimination of analog signal broadcasting by December 2006.
“JPR Special Report: Advanced Televisions,” authored by
JPR Analyst, Henry Choy, is 79 pages long and includes 33 figures and
15 tables that cover semiconductor shipments, revenue, forecasts, and
system diagrams.
Among the findings:
• ATV worldwide semiconductor revenue doubled from $197 million
in 2003 to $402 million in 2004.
• The stand-alone video decoder (VD) market for TVs will be quickly
absorbed into the video processor or MPEG video processor market by
2006 (less than 10%).
• In the video processor (VP) segment, 54% of the revenue came
from LCD TVs and 31% came from the CRT market.
• 2005 revenue for the advanced television semiconductor market
is estimated to grow to $686 million.