Punters to favour Smart TV over 3D TV
Big growth for app-running tellies forecast
Telly buyers are keener on Smart TV tech than they are on 3D, but both features are going to be taken up more enthusiastically than televisions in general over the next three years.
So says market watcher the Topology Research Institute, which reckons 52.9m Smart TVs - televisions with internet access for IPTV services and the ability to download and run basic apps - will ship next year, compared to 48.2m 3D TVs.
Many of the sets that ship will, of course, feature both technologies, and both types of set are part of the 258.2m tellies that will leave manufacturers' factories in 2012.
That's up from 250.4m in 2011, a year-on-year increase of 3.1 per cent. Growth will accelerate through 2014, Topology forecast, with shipments increasing 4.1 per cent in 2013 and 4.9 per cent in 2014.
Compare that to a 41.2 per cent increase in Smart TV shipments between 2013 and 2012, and then 66.2 per cent between 2013 and 2014.
By contrast, growth in 3D TV shipments for those two periods will be 78.2 per cent then 32.2 per cent, Topology reckons. But 3D TV unit shipments will not exceed those of Smart TVs.
Expect the market to form a three-way split, with Samsung on one branch, Google-favouring vendors like Sony on another, and the third supporting companies who prefer technology built on open standards - think HbbTV, CE-HTML and HTML 5 - such as Philips, LG and Sharp. ®
COMMENTS
>> Telly buyers are keener on Smart TV tech than they are on 3D, but both features are going to be taken up more enthusiastically than televisions in general over the next three years."
This is shipment forecasts, so I would infer "forced upon" rather than "taken up"
I still can't see any attraction to 3D tv. iPlayer / 4OD / ITV player is a reasonable bonus if making an upgrade.
Sigh
So much energy to create a giga-tonne of pointless plastic and glass so people can watch a few decent films and a couple of good series a year. What a waste. They probably have perfectly good TVs or computers that'll do the job already.
It's Friday. It's a nice sunny day, I'm off out for a walk.
Ned Ludd.
Smart TV
Does that mean it will not show cr*p like Big Brother, X Factor etc.? I'm all for it, then.
Or does that mean that you will have to login to Facebook when you turn it on?
uh, no...
Big advantage for iPlayer-enabled TVs, not app-enabled. Nobody cares about Angry Birds but the ability to catch up with that thing I saw Gene Hunt in last night on a decent screen - now that's a selling point.
You'll definitely be wanting to get into that sun after all the time you spend squinting at your 14" vga monitor, which still works quite adequately for looking at web sites ans so on.
Wait, what's that? You -upgraded- since then? Well, I never. The carbon alone...
