The technology, media, and telecom (TMT) suppliers' market is largely dominated by hardware manufacturers. Customer premises equipment for both home connectivity and entertainment services generated more than USD 24 billion in revenues in 2022. In terms of market positioning, a large proportion of leaders in the hardware market are commercializing both set-top boxes and broadband CPE. And an increasing share of their business has moved to the broadband segment in recent years following a decrease in both sales and usage of traditional pay-TV set-top boxes. Accelerating investments in CPE innovation Meanwhile, broadband CPE sales generated an estimated USD 15.6 billion in 2022. With high-speed broadband already available to a large majority of consumers in most advanced markets, operators are increasingly focusing on improving the overall user experience at home. CPE manufacturers are already developing future-proof devices on Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 standards, while the consumer market is just starting to adopt Wi-Fi 6 equipped gateways. In this segment, a growing share of revenues is heading towards home networking solutions, with dedicated companies like the Turkish Airties, or the Americans Plume and Eero which specialize in mesh solutions, Wi-Fi optimization and AI-based smart home experiences. Plume alone illustrates the interest those companies attract on financial markets: it successively secured USD 85, 270 and 300 million from funding rounds between 2020 and 2021 and reached a USD 1.5 billion valuation at the end of 2021. In 2022 set-top box manufacturers have seen their revenues drop by almost 6% year-on-year. In 2022, the STB & streaming devices market only represents two-thirds of the revenues it was generating 5 years ago. This follows a trend that has been largely unfavorable to traditional pay-TV device manufacturers over the last few years as consumers are increasingly getting equipped with connected TV sets and/or OTT streaming devices. This also means that pure players in the streaming devices segment are rapidly gaining market shares at the expense of historical market leaders. Apple TV, Chromecast, Roku and Amazon Fire TV combined market share in the TV & video hardware market (excluding TV sets) already accounted for 20% of revenues in 2022. Other device manufacturers have been forced into joining the bandwagon and launched their own products to compete in this segment, accompanying partnering telcos in their transition towards STB-less offers. SEI Robotics, for example, launched a 4K OTT dongle back in 2020 in partnership with TiVo and is now deploying small streaming hub devices with telcos across Europe, Asia and Middle East. Innopia launched its first OTT dongle for Korean service TVing back in 2014 and has since worked with Orange and Reliance Jio to develop OTT streaming devices for their customer base. Consolidation...
