Thirty-five per cent of global TV sales will be 4K UHD in 2017, taking worldwide household penetration to eight per cent, according to the latest report from Futuresource Consulting.
Futuresource’s 4K UHD Consumer Market Tracking report looks at the expected scale and impact of UHD within home entertainment, focusing on the latest key developments and trends in the market over the last quarter.
The report stated that HDR is the new battlefield for device manufacturers, but said the industry is in danger of “devaluing” the term with no universally accepted definition of how much better than ‘standard’ dynamic range devices need to be before they can be labelled HDR.
As such, said Futuresource, there are many poor implementations in the market, branded HDR, but with little discernible improvement.
The UHD media streaming market continues to hot up, with new UHD devices from Roku, Amazon and Apple helping propel worldwide 4K UHD shipments to account for 36 per cent of all media streamers sold throughout 2017.
“Despite the strong hardware sales and a significant quantity of content being shot, produced and stored in 4K, only a small proportion of that is readily available to consumers,” said Futuresource market analyst Tristan Veale.
“Therefore, the content gap is appearing to expand as the demand for the higher quality hardware is outstripping the propensity to pay for UHD content. This gap will likely continue to widen until broadcasted UHD becomes more mainstream.”
The report added that VoD providers of transactional and subscription content continue to gain momentum globally with Netflix banking over 1,000 hours of UHD content and UHD a renewed focus for Apple, Google and Amazon. Apple’s offer of 4K UHD titles at the same price as HD on its iTunes store has already prompted a response from Amazon and Google, both of which have lowered the cost of 4K UHD titles.
“UHD is increasingly standard across the key SVoD services, with many offering UHD content for no extra charge,” added Veale. “As such, by the end of 2017 globally, it is expected that there will be over 33 million homes with a 4K TV and an SVoD subscription that offers UHD content.
“SVoD providers don’t face the same issues as broadcasters in delivering content, also problems with interoperability are significantly reduced due to IP connectivity. As such, continued growth of available content on these platforms is expected.”
