-15 July 2005 -

The slug out in the ATV market

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% percent of the total ATV semiconductor revenue in 2004 and no one providing a true single chip solution from tuner to LVDS for digital TV, competition and collaboration are heating up to become the dominant player in a market anticipated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 37% from 2005 to $1.9bn 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. Among the findings ATV worldwide semiconductor revenue doubled from $197m in 2003 to $402m in 2004.

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 with different areas of competence and emphasis including video processor companies where scaling, de-interlacing and video noise reduction is key, MPEG based companies where MPEG decompression hardware and software is 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 US and a government mandated elimination of analog signal broadcasting by December 2006.

"JPR Special Report: Advanced Televisions," authored by JPR analyst, Henry Choy, is 73 pages long and includes 33 figures and 15 tables that cover semiconductor shipments, revenue, forecasts, and system diagrams.