Broadcasting

December 8, 2006
HDTV growing steadily in Asia despite challenges

SCOTTSDALE -- While an increasing portion of flat-panel TV sets hitting the market are HDTV-capable and becoming more affordable, the number of broadcasters transmitting commercial HDTV content are still limited in a majority of Asia/Pacific markets, reports In-Stat. HDTV service subscribers in the Asia/Pacific region are expected to reach 39 million in 2011, expanding from about 8 million in mid-2006, the high-tech market research firm says.

"The main obstacle for deploying HDTV has been the lack of sufficient bandwidth for satellite, terrestrial, cable, and IP networks," says Bryan Wang, In-Stat analyst. "Most Asia/Pacific regional operators are not convinced about the feasibility of HDTV to allocate considerable amount of resources to it at the cost of the numbers of channels they offer in standard definition TV."

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

• The Asia/Pacific HDTV display market amounted to 4.1 million in total unit shipments in 2005.
• India will represent the major increasing uptake in absolute
  quantity for HDTV displays in the mid- to long-term, from 2008-2011.
• With a few existing sample cases in the region, new HDTV players need to realise that a strategy that works in a specific country will not necessarily be successful in another.