1.5 Future

North American subscribers are expected to follow their European counterparts and have set-top boxes with a wide range of capabilities. Some of these capabilities include TV-commerce, allowing purchases to be made directly from the TV, as well as the capability to use the set-top box as a home media gateway. These capabilities lead marketers to envision at least one consumer electronic device interfacing with each set-top box. According to The Strategis Group, whereas in 2000 there were about 9 million subscribers in the U.S. and about 20 million worldwide, some predict a potential market size of 50 million subscribers. VOD delivering high quality picture and content is expected to be one of the drivers of this transition [DEVICETOP].

Since most of the existing systems are proprietary, the market is fragmented and costs are relatively high. The technologies needed to build such systems are well understood . The next step of industry-wide cost reduction seems to be based on component sharing and utilization of standardized interfaces.