The Asia-Pacific region will lead worldwide set-top box market growth for the next five years, according to new data from ABI Research. Asia-Pacific’s share of the market will approach 50% of all set-top boxes sold worldwide in 2013-2015 before declining slightly.

“This trend towards Asia-Pacific STB uptake is driven by the completion of digital transitions in North America and Western Europe, coupled with the digitization of cable systems in China occurring through 2015-2016,” says practice director Jason Blackwell, “Subscriber growth in India is strong too, although no clear timeline for digitization has been established, which hampers digital STB growth.”

Worldwide, video operators’ desire to offer more channels and high definition channels was evident. “2011 reflects the first full year where boxes capable of decoding MPEG-4 (H.264 AVC) will exceed legacy boxes capable of decoding only MPEG-2,” explains senior analyst Sam Rosen. “MPEG-4 is required for high-definition video, and can help fit more digital standard definition channels into the same bandwidth, compared to the MPEG-2 codec.”

Worldwide, cable services remained the most popular pay-TV platform although they continue to lose market share, primarily to telco TV (IPTV) platforms. Satellite and terrestrial platforms are gaining customers through market growth, but maintaining steady market shares.

ABI Research’s “Set-Top Box Market Data” presents an overview of STB shipments across seven video platforms: digital cable, digital satellite (pay services and free-to-air), IPTV, digital terrestrial TV (pay services and free-to-air). The data chart TV households by platform, annual shipment forecasts for each technology and box type. The inclusion of explicit forecasts for units targeted primarily at FTADBS and breaking down of units for FTADTT and PayDTT is new in this database.

It forms part of the firm’s TV and Video Research Service, which also includes other Market Data products, Research Reports, Research Briefs, ABI Insights, ABI Vendor Matrices, and analyst inquiry support.