Set-Top Box Market ‘Ripe For Further Consolidation’: Analyst

As the proposed marriages of Comcast and Time Warner and AT&T and DirecTV move forward, this latest wave of consolidation is poised to have an effect on the telecommunications supplier market, creating a fresh batch of winners and losers.

That, of course, will extend to the realm of video gateways and set-top boxes, with at least one analyst believing that this new round of mergers and acquisitions will cause a shift in a market that is largely made up of Pace, Arris (thanks to its acquisition of Motorola Home in 2013), Cisco Systems, Technicolor and EchoStar.

“This mature, yet fragmented market, in which the top five vendors account for about 37% of the revenues, is ripe for further consolidation,” Sam Rosen, practice director at ABI Research, predicted, pointing out that Arris, with its focus on cable and IPTV, stayed ahead of Pace, which, in his estimation, is “over-weighted on satellite.”