The market for the advanced video decoder platform MPEG-4 continues to grow but won't have widespread availability until next year. MPEG-2 remains a strong draw, according to new findings by market researcher-forecaster In-Stat, however.
In-Stat's latest report on the video decoders said MPEG-2 unit shipments would continue to grow in shipments through 2009, although declining requirements for MPEG-2 solutions could cause revenues to fall.
Still, In-Stat said, for all the growing attention upon MPEG-4, buzz is all it is, according to analyst Michelle Abraham.
"We expect the market will be small in 2005, as many decoder IC suppliers have been conducting interoperability testing with encoder suppliers," she said, announcing the new findings. "We expect widespread availability of MPEG-4 AVC decoder ICs beginning in 2006."
In-Stat's findings showed that MPEG video IC market revenues last year were $3.8 billion, but MPEG-4 video ICs would turn up in more mobile handsets as more mobile delivery systems come online based on DVB-H and DMB standards.
The company also said the MPEG-2 consumer encoder IC market was dominated by NEC Electronics in 2004, the second consecutive year NEC had the upper market hand, "mainly due to its design wins in DVD recorders," but STMicroelectronics had the highest MPEG video IC revenue in 2004, the fifth consecutive year that company led the revenues.
