Premium video services market to hit $277B by 2010

By Colleen Taylor -- Electronic News, 3/1/2007

The premium video services market is set to rake in premium sales revenues in coming years driven by the booming popularity of services like pay-TV, mobile video, DVD and broadband video. The market is expected to rise to $277 billion by 2010, up from less than $200 billion in 2006, according to the latest forecast from market research firm iSuppli Corp. 

Much of that growth will be driven by increasing revenue for pay-TV services, particularly for the fast-expanding Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) area, the firm said.

"The pay-television industry is the 800-pound gorilla in the entertainment space," Frank Dickson, principal analyst for multimedia content and services at iSuppli, said this week in a statement. "The pay TV market is an established and lucrative one, representing about $120 billion in worldwide sales in 2006. The segment is dominated by direct-to-home satellite and digital and analog cable TV services."

"However, the telecom companies are entering the market with aggressive IPTV offerings that are sure to spur an arms race in pay television and in quadruple-play services," Dickson added.

IPTV is the fastest-expanding segment of the pay-TV market, with revenue expected to increase to $23.5 billion in 2010, rising at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 103 percent from $681 million in 2005, iSuppli predicted. That's a boosted estimate from just six months ago, when iSuppli forecasted that global IPTV subscribers would rise at a CAGR of 92.1 percent from 2005 to 2010.