The last decade has been a roller coaster ride in the Latin American FSS market with numerous peaks and valleys in both supply and demand. The decade started out with a mass of satellite launches that drove up supply, but transponder demand lagged leading to a buyer’s market with very low pricing. Then starting in about 2008, demand for capacity, most especially Ku-band transponders, grew very rapidly driven by DTH, video distribution and VSAT networking services for a plethora of rural connectivity, e-governance and USO projects.

North American satellite pay-TV providers have not been adding subscribers at the same rate as previous years. Competition has been fierce from cable and telco providers offering bundled services and gains in subscribers as a result of being the video portion of telco triple play offers, have mostly run their course.  In Europe, the market will be impacted by less need for set top boxes, because more TV sets have integrated satellite tuners and CI+ slots.

Television manufacturers are viewing 3D developments as the next big thing for the 3D TV industry, and expect it to boost sales and interest as much as color TVs did to black and white entertainment decades ago. They have already announced several 3D TV ready models, with many more to come in 2011. There is now talk of 3D broadcast channels in America, Europe and Asia for the coming years.

Global unit shipments of consumer electronics (CE) products will climb 2.6 percent in 2010, partly driven by rising sales of products that play a role in the connected home and that focus on usability—rather than technological wizardry—according to new IHS iSuppli research.

There has been solid growth in the Earth Observation (EO) market in the past few years due to a strengthening of demand for civil government and military EO satellites and associated data. However, this reliance on government and military organizations distorts true market economics, as only a few large users such as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) provide the majority of revenues for U.S.-based operators according to NSR.

The Majority Deployed in North America and Europe

Bytemobile data shows that video became the dominant form of mobile data traffic in 2010 – accounting for more than 40 percent of the total volume in wireless networks worldwide. With the rise of full-length and studio-quality videos and live streaming of multimedia content on mobile devices – as well as the emergence of two-way video communications – Bytemobile expects mobile data traffic to spike to an all-time high in 2011.

Based on an analysis of data trends across its customers’ wireless networks, Bytemobile expects to see the following developments in the coming year:

Based on information from 875 IPTV Operators, where the total number of IPTV Operators have increased by 22 since Q2/2010, the rate of growth of global IPTVOperators continues at a rate of over 10 new Operators per quarter, with about 50% of those in North America.

While many regions and markets see video demand growth arrive in peaks and valleys, the constant and steady expansion of the Central & Eastern European video distribution and DTH segments has come with near clocklike regularity over the last five years (or more).  

The latest illustrations of this trend include:

Although mobile service revenue growth accelerated in 2010 as mobile operators benefitted from growing consumer spend after the recession, a similar boost in 2011 is unlikely. The Strategy Analytics Wireless Operator Strategies (WOS) service report, “Worldwide Cellular User Forecasts and 2011 Market Trends,” predicts revenue growth will slow to 4% in 2011 as the sector crawls toward the $1 trillion revenue mark.