Russ Pearlman's Blog

A repost from my guest blog appearance from the Ericsson Televisionary blog site.

Capgemini Conulting just released a report together with In-Stat where we estimate that, by 2013, about 46 million households will use a connected Blu-ray player, video game console or a media enabled PC to stream video from the Internet to a TV set. Overall, the data from the report points to a strong and sustained growth pattern for the electronic entertainment industry. Central to the report’s findings is an identified US$10 billion in revenues that do not exist today—but will be on the market for electronic entertainment by 2013. Other key findings from the report include:

• By 2013, 93 million US households will have broadband (up from 72.9 million in 2008) • Saturation of media enabled PCs connected to TV sets is expected to reach 45.2 million US households by 2013 (up from 18 million in 2008)
• Pay-TV video on demand services are expected to provide over US$ 2.6 billion in ad revenues to the Pay-TV industry in 2013
• In 2008, the market for advertising delivered through online video services was nascent. By 2013, Capgemini and InStat expect this market to grow by over 1400 percent—up to about US$ 1.8 billion.

To download the entire report for free please click. To learn more about innovative Digital Content Services that are helping define, shape and implement new business models for companies in order to capitalize on this new market growth, please click for a free whitepaper.

So, Chitika Labs has a relatively scientific way to track iPads sales by looking across their ad network looking for iPads that are browsing the network. Pretty good idea, and it seems fairly reasonable to me. As of this time, they are tracking North of 850,000 iPads out there in the wild with an uptick of about 1 every 3 seconds (if that rate keeps up, that represents about 10M iPads per year). Interestingly, they also have some information related to usage by state (thus my quick calculation of 25,000 iPads in Wyoming).

Now, I’m not trying to continue throwing cold water on Apple, and this is now my third posting on the iPad, but I think that these preliminary numbers continue to reinforce my estimate of about 4.5M iPads that I think will ultimately be sold. I think that the strong out of the gate “fanboi” buyers boosted the original population, and I suspect that update will slow down quite a bit. When the 3G versions come out, there will certainly be another major uptick, but I don’t expect that to be huge.

Anecdotally, I’m hearing a lot of great things about the iPad, and I’m even hearing about “notebook” replacements, but I don’t think that is realistic. It’s a good device for simple email, browsing and viewing Microsoft Office documents. But the more advanced capabilities of a laptop is still essential.