Whenever we build applications for a new platform we like to understand the target market, market drivers, and the overall competitive landscape. In the process of understanding the set-top box market, I ran into a handful of great HDTV, set-box and video stats and facts that I thought would be interesting to share:

HDTV and TV

• Approximately 70% of people aged 34 years and younger surfing the Internet while watching their TV – CEA
• Nearly 60% of HDTV owners consider themselves sports fans – CEA
• 50% of HDTV owners cited HD sports as their primary purchasing factor – CEA
• 90% of fantasy sports players use Internet to look up sports info while watching TV – Fantasy Sports Trade Ass.
• Favorite sports programming watched in HD include Super Bowl (78%) and college football (41%) – CEA
• This year’s Super Bowl is expected to drive the purchase of approximately 2.4M HDTV units – CEA
• 18% of consumers watching the Super Bowl expect to be online during the game to check stats, IM with friends or check betting lines – CEA
• 12% plan to use a PC in another room to check statistics during the game and 13 percent expect to use their mobile phone for the same purpose – CEA
• Samsung is the worldwide TV brand leader with 20.8% of the revenue share (Q1 2008) followed by Sony, LGE and Sharp – Digitimes
• Around half a billion homes worldwide are expected to have digital TV by 2011, and in the future the integrated media center will be at the heart of the Digital Home – BuddeComm
• CEA predicted that 16M HDTV would sell in 2007 bringing the total number of HDTVs sold in the US to 52.5M – CEA

Digital Set-top Boxes

• In April 2007, Motorola announced shipped its one millionth IP-based set-top box – Daily IPTV
• Apple TV could eclipse both TiVo (4.4M users) and  Netflix (8.8M users) – Daily IPTV
• AT&T expects targeted advertising on its video and mobile services to become a $1B business by 2010 – Daily IPTV
• Set-top boxes are merging Web-based services with TV. AT&T invested $26.5 million in ChoiceStream last year. Time Warner Cable rolled out software from Biap Systems that allows users to bid on eBay and track fantasy football statistics wither their cable remote – WSJ
• Google has partner with EchoStar to use set-tops to  buying, selling, and measuring the impact of TV ads running on Dish Network – WSJ
• According to In-Stat, it is estimated that the number of set-top boxes shipped (worldwide) since 2000 will exceed 150 million by 2009 – WSJ
• Google is already streaming YouTube videos into living room via devices like Apple TV and HP’s Media Smart TV as soon the Playstation 3.

Online and Mobile Video

• 57% of adult Internet users have watch or download video from the Internet – Pew
• 57% of online video viewers share links to the videos they find with others – Pew
• 75% of users have receive links to watch video from someone else – Pew
• 63% of Apple iPhone users have viewed videos vs 28% of regular cell phone users – Interpret
• 18% of mobile phone users reported they have recorded a video on their phone, 10% said they had watched a video on their phone – Pew
• In Feb 2008, 10.1B videos were viewed online, a 66% year-over-year leap – comScore
• 123M Americans viewed online video at least once a month in 2007 – eMarketer