Informa Telecoms and Media forecasts that 22.2 million homes in the world will be watching 3DTV programming by the end of 2015. This figure represents just 1.6% of the world’s TV households, so significant growth is still very likely beyond this date, the analyst says.

The US is expected to stay the dominant active 3DTV territory, recording 8.7 million active 3DTV households by end-2015, followed by Japan (2 million), the UK (1.6 million) and South Korea (1.5 million). Informa reckons 3DTV will also receive government support in countries with a large set manufacturing base.

Digital cable is expected to be the leading 3DTV platform – consistently taking around half of the active 3DTV households up to 2015. This translates to 10.4 million 3D cable households at end-2015 (2.7% of digital cable homes), up from 183,000 at end-2011. The US will account for 4.7 million of the 2015 total, followed by Japan (1.0 million) and South Korea (1.0 million).

“3DTV penetration will be higher in pay DTH homes (3.7% by 2015) than for other platforms. DTH operators have generally been more active in promoting 3DTV than the other platforms,” says Adam Thomas, Media Research Manager at Informa. “This is due principally to their need to differentiate themselves from the other platforms with advanced TV services to counter the triple-play bundles and true VOD offered by cable and IPTV operators.”

Assuming sufficient transponder availability, DTH is also less capacity restricted than most cable and IPTV operators. The US will contribute 2.9 million of the global active 3DTV DTH total of 6.7 million by end-2015. The UK will be second with 892,000, followed by France (445,000) and Japan (291,000).

Story filed 17.05.11