Analysts have flooded the market with reports and perspectives foretelling the arrival of the streaming wars. Serving as the industry’s own “winter is coming” mantra -- à la Game of Thrones -- the streaming wars were portrayed as a great competition for discrete household content budgets. 

The market for virtual assistants (VAs) continues to illustrate strong positive momentum, according to a new report from Futuresource Consulting. Shipments of virtual assistants rose 25% year-on-year to 1.1 billion units in 2019, with the market on course to exceed 2.5 billion shipments by 2023.

Microsoft in 2018 became the market share leader for total off-premises cloud service revenue with 13.8 percent share, bumping Amazon to the #2 spot with 13.2 percent; IBM was #3 with 8.8 percent revenue share, according to IHS Markit. Microsoft’s success can be attributed to its comprehensive portfolio and the growth it is experiencing from its more advanced PaaS and CaaS offerings.

Household spending on subscription OTT video services has held steady for three years, averaging just under $8 per month since 2016 according to Parks Associates’ OTT Video Research. Given the growing adoption of OTT video services over the past three years, these figures suggest that adoption of multiple services or expensive services by some consumers is offset by a larger base of consumers who either subscribe to one or two relatively inexpensive services, including 30 percent of consumers who do not spend any money on OTT video services.

Amazon (AWS), Google, IBM, Microsoft (Azurea) and Alibaba were named “leaders” by IHS  Markit's new scorecard on off-premises cloud IT service providers.
“Leadership in the cloud IT infrastructure services market requires a diverse portfolio, and all of the leaders have strong brand awareness and a reputation of innovation,” said Devan Adams, principal analyst, cloud and data center research practice, IHS Markit.

Demand for smart home devices and systems continued to soar over the past six months creating the bedrock for a coming wave of new smart home services and revenue streams, according to a new report from ABI Research.

The front door is a front-and-center opportunity for smart home device companies according to a new report by Strategy Analytics . According to the report, “ Smart Home Access Control: Predictions, Players, and Products ”, sales of nearly 26 million units in 2023 will push the smart lock market size past $2.4 billion.

The worldwide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market grew 29.5 percent in 2017 to total $23.5 billion, up from $18.2 billion in 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. Amazon was the No. 1 vendor in the IaaS market in 2017, followed by Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM.

The overall tablet market for Western Europe declined 8.1 percent year-over-year (YoY), shipping 6.6 million units in the first quarter of 2018, according to new research from International Data Corp.

Cameras with full software and service feature sets at sub $200 price points will fuel growth of the smart home surveillance camera market according to recently published research by Strategy Analytics.

Digital pay TV subscriptions around the world, including cable, satellite and IPTV, exceeded one billion for the first time in 2017, according to new research from IHS Markit. This global growth comes despite the continued uptake of over-the-top (OTT) subscription video services, like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, which added more than three times the number of subscriptions than pay TV last year, according to IHS Markit.  

Parks Associates has released its updated list of the top 10 subscription over-the-top (OTT) video services in the U.S. market, based on number of subscribers -- and Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu continue to hold the top three slots.  Meanwhile, HBO Now made a significant move into the top five.