Market trends

The digital home market can be broken down into the following segments: home entertainment, integrated home automation, networked household appliances and integrated home surveillance. The general market for digital home solutions is still in its infancy. Many telecommunications, IT and media companies are pinning great hopes on the future digital home market. Nevertheless up to now experts are only cautiously optimistic with regard to growth prospects and market potential over the next ten years (Figure 20).

Figure 20:		Growth prospects for the digital home market through 2015 (Digital home experts)

Most experts surveyed (around 62%) are reserved in their assessment of growth prospects for the entire digital home market (including networked household appliances and home automation) by 2010. Looking at 2015 on the other hand, around 43% of digital home experts come to a positive conclusion: 35% of them expect market growth to be high, 8% believe it will be very high.

Compared with this, the forecast for the digital home entertainment segment is much more positive (Figure 21). Around 62% of experts assess the growth prospects for integrated home entertainment networks by 2015 to be high (ca. 35%) to very high (around 27%).

Figure 21:		Growth prospects for the integrated home entertainment network through 2015 (Digital home experts)

An example of an integrated home entertainment solution is the networking of TV set with set-top box, video recorder, stereo system and games console all together, as well as connecting the appliances to a broadband Internet connection. With a solution like this, Video on Demand, Music on Demand and online gaming can be integrated seamlessly.

When you compare the different segments of the digital home market, it is evident that home entertainment already has the largest share today with around 71%. The other segments (integrated home automation, household appliances and home surveillance) have a much smaller market share which, in the experts’ opinion, will not change that much in the future either.

Overall, digital home experts assume that the home entertainment segment in 2015 will make up around 53% of the digital home market. Integrated home automation is considered to be the second largest segment in 2015 at around 20%. The segments of integrated household surveillance and household appliances are expected to have a market share of the overall digital home market of around 11% and 15% respectively by 2015.