Research by Understanding & Solutions reveals substantial growth opportunities within the HD market, with 115m HD-Ready homes in Western Europe by 2010. Consumer demand for flat panel displays, particularly LCD displays, continued unabated during 2006 and exceeded expectations with flat panel volume growth of nearly 80% across Europe and 130% in the USA.

The accelerated demand for flat screen technology has resulted in the rapid decline of the traditional CRT market, which was overtaken for the first time last year by the flat panel market in both Europe and the USA.

In the USA, prices dropped last year by 15% and 10% for plasma (PDP) and LCD respectively, according to research by the UK-based analysts. In Western Europe, the decline was even more marked, with plasma dropping an average of 25% and LCD by 20%. On the older, lower specification models, there were price declines of 50% or more.

Other reasons for market growth are a move by the major A-brands and many other manufacturers to ‘flat panel only’ offerings – manufacturers like Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer and the like no longer include CRTs in their TV range” says says Simon Bryant, Business Director, Consumer Electronic at Understanding & Solutions. “There has also been a shortening of the replacement cycle for TVs, as consumers rush to purchase these fashionable flat panel products as lifestyle statements.”

Screen size shift and HD Ready' success

A key feature of the rapid adoption of flat panel technology has been a marked increase in the average screen size of TVs in homes, in Europe especially. While the 32” LCD remains the most popular format in the flat panel market in Europe there has been a distinct shift of sales towards the 37” and 42” segments, with increasing numbers of consumer opting for 50” or larger.

By 2010, Understanding & Solutions forecasts that 25% of annual TV sales in Europe will be 37” or larger, and a massive 60% will be larger than 32”. Such a shift in consumer attitudes towards TV screens would have been almost unthinkable just 5 years ago, when European consumers regarded 28” as a ‘big’ TV and many homes would now have more than 21” ‘boxes’ in the living room.

The rapid uptake of flat panel displays has coincided, particularly in Europe, with the availability of so-called ‘HD Ready’ displays. High Definition has been agreed in the EU to be defined as having vertical resolution of 720 lines or more. A new generation of ‘Full HD’ screens with 1080 line resolution are now appearing but are presently too expensive for most consumers.

Within the space of a couple of years, nearly all available flat panel TVs of 28” and above have become ‘HD Ready’, a notable success for consumer electronics marketing and ‘priming the pump’ for introduction of HDTV broadcast services and High Definition DVD in Europe.

720 vs. 1080

Until now the differing resolutions offered by flat panels TVs has remained a background issue for most consumers, with screen size and price driving the purchase decision. However, last year saw the beginning of a push by manufacturers of 1080 panels to increase awareness of what has been termed ‘Full HD’.

While all recent flat panel models are capable of handling any high definition input and scaling appropriately, whether it has 720 or 1080 lines, an increasing amount of content is becoming available in 1080 resolution, including 1080p from Bluray/HD DVD players and the PS3 games console.

The Interlaced vs. Progressive scan issue adds a further dimension to the argument, although one that the majority of consumers are unlikely to understand. As withnessed with processor speeds in the PC market and megapixels in the digital camera market, bigger is often perceived as better and the marketing of 1080 panels as ‘Full HD’ is expected to help drive 1080p from around 8% of total flat panel sales in 2006 in the USA (3% in Western Europe) to over 30% by 2010 in the USA and 20% in Western Europe.

HDTV

HDTV broadcasting has been widely available for more than 3 years in the US, across all major broadcast platforms and has become the centre of a competitive battleground between the platforms and operators. Exponents of each delivery platform have tried to outperform the others, particularly in terms of the number of HD channels and amount of HD content that can be provided.

In Western Europe, although there are now dozens of HD channels in existence, there are few ways to actually reach consumers at present as there is no HD off-air (DVB-T) broadcasting and Cable, Satellite and IPTV operators are only just now starting to introduce HD services, and even then at a premium for subscription customers.

However, European broadcasters across all platforms are eager to introduce HDTV transmissions as early as possible, not just for competitive reasons, but also to counter the tendency of large size LCD and plasma screens to act as ‘impairment magnifiers’, resulting in a reduction in the perceived viewing quality of SD transmissions when compared to CRT displays.









For details on the report, contact: www.uands.com

Story filed 20.05.07