TV phones to surpass traditional TVs in six years

Sales of TV phones will surpass traditional televisions within just six years, analysts predicted today.

Revenues from TV phones will soar from $5bn in 2006 to over $30bn by 2010, according to a report from Strategy Analytics, and the devices will outnumber fixed TVs in a further two years.

Chris Ambrosio, Strategy Analytics' director of wireless device research, said: "We see component integration and improvement in the power/performance threshold as requisite to driving form factors below the sweet spot 100-gram level.

"The feeding frenzy around TV phones, however, is a tremendous positive for component vendors such as ATI, and memory vendors like SanDisk.

"And display vendors will see that over two-thirds of mobile phones sold will have displays larger than 2.5in."

Neil Mawston, associate director in the analyst firm's Global Wireless Practice, and author of the report, added: "Japan and Korea dominate market volumes today, accounting for over 80 per cent of TV phones sold in 2006.

"However, western Europe, North America and China will be the hotspots for global volume growth over the next few years. We expect western Europe to ramp up to over one million units sold this year, with North America and China coming online in 2007.

"The share of TV phone volume held by Japan and Korea will drop precipitously to under 50 per cent by 2008, and under one third by 2010."

The report predicts that DVB-H will account for 19 per cent of TV phones sold in 2006, rising to 40 per cent by 2010 as a result of strong support from tier-one players such as Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and Siemens.

Strategy Analytics also noted that early product developments illustrate a broad demand for 'TV-Out', where the handset becomes a 'pocket server' with wired connectivity to send content directly to the home TV, video recorder and/or set-top box for viewing/playback of TV, video and mobile games.

The analyst firm urged technology vendors including Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, ATI, Philips and STMicroelectronics to help handset vendors work through the "inevitable" size/design/power/integration and price trade-offs in the post cameraphone mobile era.