Game consoles most popular Web-video player

DIGITAL: Connected units to doubled by 2013, report says

By Danny King -- Video Business, 6/16/2009

JUNE 16 | DIGITAL: Videogame consoles will be the most popular electronic component used to play Web videos on television sets for at least the next four years as consumer spending on Web-to-television content surges, according to one report released this week.

Game consoles will account for about three-quarters of the 24 million U.S. households with Web-enabled electronic components in 2013, research firm In-Stat reported yesterday. By then, the number of game consoles used to play Internet videos on TV—most of which are now Microsoft Xbox 360 machines—will have doubled, according to In-Stat.

Videogame consoles will remain the primary Web-to-video component despite the fact that sales of Web-connected DVD and Blu-ray Disc players are expected to rise as prices fall, according to Keith Nissen, analyst at In-Stat.

Consoles will increase in popularity as consumer spending on video content streamed from the Internet to TVs jumps almost fivefold to about $2.9 billion in 2013 from about $600 million this year, In-Stat said last month.

"In 2011, Web-enabled TVs and Web-enabled set-top boxes will begin to take hold in the market, making the adoption of Web-to-TV a non-technical event," said Nissen. "The future consumer household will have multiple Web-to-TV devices."

Much of Xbox 360's use for Web-to-TV content transmission has been driven by Netflix's agreement last November to have its video-streamed titles playable on TVs through Xbox consoles, according to Nissen. Within the first three months of the agreement, 1 million Xbox owners had downloaded the application required to play Netflix titles, Netflix said in February.

The Xbox 360 also offers downloadable content for TV playback through Microsoft's online Xbox Live site.

Despite the growing use of videogame consoles for Web-to-TV content, Nintendo's Wii, which doesn't have Web-video capabilities, remains the most popular videogame platform in the U.S. Nintendo sold 340,000 Wii consoles in April, compared with Xbox 360's sales of 175,000 units and Sony's 127,000 PlayStation 3 consoles sold, according to NPD. Like Xbox 360s, PS3s offer downloadable content from the online PlayStation Store that's playable on TVs.

In-Stat is a sister company to Video Business.