Revenue generated globally by over-the-top services is on pace to surpass $200 billion by the end of 2023, according to new data published by global tech market advisory firm ABI Research.

This represents revenue growth of more than 50% over 2019, during which OTT companies generated $129.4 billion in revenue, 90% of which came from subscriptions and advertising, the research company said.

The projection culminates a decade of growth for the domestic streaming business. In 2013, ABI Research said the OTT market only generated about $12.2 billion in revenue.

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Study author Michael Inouye, principal analyst at ABI Research, credits the growth to new market entrants like Disney+ and Apple TV+, as well as “aggressive pricing and packaging, and continue expansion of incumbents pushing the subscription video on demand (SVOD) market to new heights.”

Growth in the Asia-Pacific region, specifically China, is also listed a factor, as is the expansion of new access technologies like 5G.

"Cord-cutting is often regarded as a consequence of expanding OTT consumption, but the market dynamics are more complex, particularly when one considers how the pay TV industry has embraced OTT as a complement and value-additive, rather than strict competition,” Inouye said in a statement. Over time, we expect the traditional pay TV offer to continue to evolve and become indistinguishable from a pure OTT package of services.”

The study also noted that even with over 700 million OTT SVOD subscriptions in 2019, the pay TV market, with over 1 billion subscriptions worldwide, is still larger.

And, while pay TV growth rates are slower (and declining in North America), the overall market is still expanding.

"Increasingly, we're seeing more solutions and conversations about bringing content and services together,” Inouye added. “This includes pay TV and OTT bundles and extends to cross-platform advertising, analytics, and customer/service management. Ultimately it makes the market more accessible to a wider range of companies and expands the potential video touch points, particularly as new technologies like 5G, smart home, and Augmented/Virtual Reality play larger roles.” 

Revenue generated globally by over-the-top services is on pace to surpass $200 billion by the end of 2023, according to new data published by global tech market advisory firm ABI Research.

This represents revenue growth of more than 50% over 2019, during which OTT companies generated $129.4 billion in revenue, 90% of which came from subscriptions and advertising, the research company said. 

The projection culminates a decade of growth for the domestic streaming business. In 2013, ABI Research said the OTT market only generated about $12.2 billion in revenue. 

Study author Michael Inouye, principal analyst at ABI Research, credits the growth to new market entrants like Disney+ and Apple TV+, as well as “aggressive pricing and packaging, and continue expansion of incumbents pushing the subscription video on demand (SVOD) market to new heights.”

Growth in the Asia-Pacific region, specifically China, is also listed a factor, as is the expansion of new access technologies like 5G.

"Cord-cutting is often regarded as a consequence of expanding OTT consumption, but the market dynamics are more complex, particularly when one considers how the pay TV industry has embraced OTT as a complement and value-additive, rather than strict competition,” Inouye said in a statement. Over time, we expect the traditional pay TV offer to continue to evolve and become indistinguishable from a pure OTT package of services.” 

The study also noted that even with over 700 million OTT SVOD subscriptions in 2019, the pay TV market, with over 1 billion subscriptions worldwide, is still larger.  

And, while pay TV growth rates are slower (and declining in North America), the overall market is still expanding. 

"Increasingly, we're seeing more solutions and conversations about bringing content and services together,” Inouye added. “This includes pay TV and OTT bundles and extends to cross-platform advertising, analytics, and customer/service management. Ultimately it makes the market more accessible to a wider range of companies and expands the potential video touchpoints, particularly as new technologies like 5G, smart home, and Augmented/Virtual Reality play larger roles.”

The constantly percolating promises for the Internet of Things heated up this month as several forecasts envisioned accelerating IoT momentum. 

The new spate of predictions leapfrogged the promises described here. Now numbers such as $1.7 trillion or $3 trillion are the revenue targets (depending on who you believe), and 27 billion or 50 billion devices will be in use (again chose your preferred prognosticator).

Related:The IoT Customers Are Coming. Are You Ready?

Beyond the predictable inconsistent hype, though, is a fundamental recognition that processes are moving quickly now to develop applications and distribution systems for IoT ecosystems. There's plenty of talk about wireless facilities, including broadband in the IoT outlooks, but "cable" is missing from the prognosticators' papers.

Not that existing telecom carriers are absent from the IoT predictions. Indeed, this month's spate of forecasts -- from groups including Gartner, International Data Corp. (IDC),  Machina Research, ABI Research, Cisco and others -- repeatedly emphasized the importance of very short-range IoT connections, similar to the ones that cable companies' "smart home" services are beginning to offer.

Many of the IoT forecasts also concentrate on the role of "smart cities," an opportunity in which cable's core infrastructure becomes a factor.

A McKinsey research report expects that hundreds of "smart cities" worldwide by 2025 will generate 60% of global GDP. Building systems for that capacity is clearly part of the IoT equation -- especially with corporate users expected to be the primary engine for IoT initially.  

That's another opportunity for integrated cable infrastructure. (Separately, several policy development - such as the FCC's ongoing Business Data Servicesrulemaking also raise smart cities issues. In addition, groups such as the Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group (BITAG) are examining the technical aspects of IoT security and privacy.

With the onslaught of new IoT forecasts, it's easy to get lost in the deluge of data.  A sage analysis in the IEEE Spectrumrecently pointed out that many of the IoT forecasts are based "on the demand for devices that have largely not yet been invented or commercialized."

Therein lies the challenge for cable and other infrastructure providers who are trying to foresee the facilities need to reach those unknown (unknowable) devices.

Nonetheless, the enthusiasm of this month's forecasts recognizes the quickening pace of IoT creativity. For example, IDC issued several reports in the past fortnight, including its "2016 Mid-Year Review of IoT"and its globalsurvey "International Initiatives in IoT."IDC characterized IoT as "one of the hottest technology trends across a multitude of industries."

IDC's forecasts envision a nearly 10-fold growth in IoT "actionable data" delivery between 2020 and 2025, resulting in a global annual 180 Zettabytes (that is 180 trillion gigabytes) of data created nine years from now (up from 10 Zettabytes last year).

Machina Research brings a much more conservative perspective, but still foresees a  $3 trillion  revenue opportunity from IoT by 2025. It expects that IoT will generate only 2 Zettabytes of data, mostly from consumer electronics devices. It envisions that many of the connections will be handled by Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) connections, such as LoRa (a low-power, long-range wireless protocol), Sigfox (a proprietary IoT format developed by a French firm), and LTE-NB1 (a Narrow Band wireless technology optimized for IoT).

The ABI Research study looked at the role of IoT in the emerging market for machine learning technologies for data analytics. It forecasts nearly $20 billion in revenue in 2021 "as Machine-Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) models take off."

To put the recent IoT hype into further perspective: They emerged just as Cisco and Intel announced massive layoffs in their traditional businesses to focus on IoT. Cisco said early this month that it would shed 5,500 staff as it "refocuses" on IoT, security, next-generation data centers and cloud" services. Intel's announcement at last week's Intel Developers Forum that it would concentrate on IoT and virtual reality followed its decision in April to lay off 12,000 employees, most of them involved with Intel's historic (but slowing) personal computer activities.

Collectively, this month's reports about IoT opportunities should fuel attention to the role that broadband operators -- with their forays into wireless micro-local delivery -- will play in the new IoT category that is both over-hyped and under-hyped simultaneously.

The DOCSIS 3.1 era is just getting underway, but ABI Research has already taken a stab at its expected onramp, predicting that 9 million broadband subs will using equipment powered by the next-gen platform by 2017.

While 9 million is a big round number, it’s a drop in the broadband bucket, as it will represent just a bit more than 1% of the world’s total fixed broadband subscriber base, ABI noted.

DOCSIS 3.1 is made to handle up to 10 Gbps down and at least 1 Gbps upstream, and the technology will be used to help MSOs deliver gigabit speeds to residential customers on their widely deployed HFC networks.

ABI’s prediction arrives soon after CableLabs certified a handful of D3.1 modems from manufacturers, a key milestone along the way to the MSO deployment phase.

Among MSOs, Comcast and Liberty Global have aggressive plans for D3.1. ABI also points out that DOCSIS 3.1 is also factoring into the plans of Altice, TDC, Midcontinent Communications  and Telenet, among others.