The adoption of digital PC-TV tuners will accelerate in Europe as Digital Terrestrial TV services continue to expand there. Asia, China and India will present strong growth opportunities. North America is expected to see a surge during 2009, when analog TV is cut off, and new mobile digital broadcast TV services are introduced by major U.S. TV stations. The high-tech market research firm In-Stat cautions that the uptake of PC-TV tuners is not guaranteed, as they face challenges from a wide variety of options, consumers now have to use computers to gather and view a wide range of video content.

“The challenges to PC-TV tuner adoption include easy-to-use Cable, TelcoTV and satellite TV services that provide high-quality Video-on-Demand, Internet distributed video content, IPTV services and mobile broadband, such as 3G, WiFi, and WiMAX,” says Gerry Kaufhold, In-Stat analyst. “While some European cable and satellite operators allow the use of digital PC-TV tuners with conditional access to receive premium content, the U.S. market will take some time to implement CableLab’s tru2way technology. Microsoft also needs to improve their internal support for multiple tuners in a PC.”

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

• By 2012, there will be 30.8 million PC-TV tuners sold annually, with a total retail value of US$1.7 billion.
• Western Europe and Japan lead in the uptake of digital PC-TV tuners.
• In 2005, 60.1% of PC-TV tuners shipped were analog, but the analog tuner market share dropped to 48.3% in 2006, and then to 39.7% in 2007.

The research, “Worldwide PC-TV Tuners: Driven by Digital Broadcasting”, covers the worldwide market for PC-TV tuners. It provides unit shipment, revenue and average selling price forecasts for analog and digital PC-TV tuners by region through 2012. Regional market drivers and barriers are analyzed, along with industry trends.