Thanks in part to the rise of smartphone-powered virtual reality platforms such as Google’s just-announced Daydream View, the installed base of VR headsets will soar from 4 million in 2015 to 81 million in 2020, IHS Technology predicts.

On the higher end of the VR headset spectrum, IHS also expects Sony’s PlayStation VR platform (for PS4 consoles) to outsell the two main PC-connected platforms – the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive – in 2016.  This year, IHS Technology forecasts that PlayStation VR will sell 1.4 million headsets, and generate $134 million in spending on VR entertainment, versus $69 million for PC-based headsets.

However, mobile VR headsets, such as the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR and Daydream View, will nab the biggest share. IHS sees smartphone VR headsets representing 87% of the market’s installed base by the end of 2016.

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On the mobile side, IHS expects the Gear VR to have the largest installed base of all major branded headsets with 5.4 million this year, but expects the Daydream View to “slowly disrupt Samsung’s dominant market position” and become the most popular headset for VR by 2019.

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IHS also expects consumers to spend $1.6 billion on VR headsets this year, bolstered by more expensive platforms like the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Sony PS VR.

“Smartphone VR headsets will represent the largest addressable market for VR content because of cheaper pricing,” Ian Fogg, senior director at IHS Technology, said in a statement. “The smartphone VR base will be a major opportunity for VR content experimentation

“Smartphone VR headsets’ share of the VR installed base will be 87 percent at the end of 2016.”

However, the firm also expects higher-end VR headsets to dominate content monetization, with IHS predicting that consumer spending on VR entertainment will hit $3.3 billion by 2020, up from a mere $310 million in 2016.

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“There will be a polarization of the VR market between lower volume premium VR headsets, which will have strong paid content conversion rates, and higher-volume cheaper smartphone VR headsets, which will monetise content at a lower rate,” Piers Harding-Rolls, director of games analysis at IHS Technology, noted. “A $3.3 billion VR entertainment market by 2020 will represent less than 1 percent of overall entertainment spending worldwide.”

Immersive and interactive games tend to get top billing at this stage of the virtual reality market’s evolution, but 360-degree video could be the category that unleashes VR to the masses.

Video sets a “baseline of usage” that establishes a gateway of discovery for VR consumers, offering a path to games and other immersive apps and experiences provided by the platform, Nick DiCarlo, vice president of immersive products and virtual reality at Samsung Electronics America, said.

“No matter what kind of game or other content you’re interested in, you watch video,” said DiCarlo, who will be the opening keynote speaker at NewBay Media’s Virtual Reality 20/20 event at The TimesCenter |in New York on Oct. 17.

Samsung is approaching its first full year with a commercially available VR product — the Gear VR, an Oculus-powered headset that connects to compatible smartphones and a curated ecosystem of apps and services.

“Video, we thought, was going to be really important for VR,” DiCarlo said of Samsung’s opinion as it analyzed how the market might evolve following the launch of its “Innovator” edition of Gear VR in November 2014, followed by the consumer version about a year later. “We believed in 360-degree video as a way to help VR become really mainstream.”

Inspired by the television model, Samsung’s ambition early on was to release one new VR video a day. It turns out that the company’s goals underestimated its ambitions.

“We thought that VR needed … something new every day,” DiCarlo said. “By the end of 2015, we were releasing five videos a day.”

The growing reach of specialized 360-degree cameras and stitching software keeps filling the VR pipeline. And YouTube and Facebook have fully embraced 360 video.

“The creation and release of 360 video has absolutely blown away our expectations for how rich and creative and capable of an ecosystem that was out there,” DiCarlo said.

The numbers also bear out video’s popularity: Though it’s still early days, only about 40% of the apps available for Gear VR are games.

That’s surprising, Di- Carlo said, because all of the early talk about VR content centered on games, with 360 video seen as a smaller complement. It turns out that 360 video is a “little bit bigger” than games on Gear VR.

“If you love games, you also watch video. But if you watch video you don’t necessarily love games,” DiCarlo said, noting that other categories such as social VR (AltspaceVR, for example) and VR real estate and entertainment systems from companies like Matterport will also factor heavily into the direction of the market.

Likewise, the broader VR ecosystem — from the headsets and the smartphones that power them, to the apps to the content contained in those apps — has evolved rapidly.

“All of these things need to happen all at once before you can sell one unit,” DiCarlo said. “What’s happened in the last year is nothing short of extraordinary.”

“Millions” of hours of VR video have been consumed on Gear VR, he said; the platform recently eclipsed 1 million active monthly users. “It has started to hit some big, key milestones,” DiCarlo said.

Samsung has been partially helped in hitting those numbers by a promotion which gave free Gear VR headsets to customers who pre-ordered the company’s new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones.

That promotion “exceeded our expectations,” DiCarlo said. “It took a lot of people by surprise how effective that was.”

Of course, Gear VR is far from alone in an increasingly competitive market. While PC-connected platforms such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive target the highest end of VR’s consumer category, the mobile sector of the market, where Samsung lives today, already contends with relatively cheap Cardboard viewers. Google’s Android- powered Daydream system is also expected to debut later this year.

DiCarlo is convinced Gear VR’s performance will give it the edge, noting that the headset-smartphone combination supports 20-milisecond “motion-to-photon latency,” referring to how quickly the display updates and changes when people move their heads.

“The best VR headsets in the world are equal to that,” he said. “There isn’t a mobile-powered headset that’s even close to that.”

He also said consumers find the device itself comfortable to wear — something that’s necessary if it’s to appeal to a mass audience.

“If you want regular people to use this product, it has to be comfortable. It’s not even an option,” he said. “That’s a critical, though often misunderstood, differentiating feature that we have yet to see matched by any mobile device in the marketplace that you can actually buy.”

The platform’s app ecosystem is also key. Gear VR’s compatible smartphones are designed to download software automatically, removing some manual processes.

At the same time, explaining these differentiators is a challenge at retail. When HDTV came on the scene, it took some seeing for would-be buyers to believe. For VR, consumers will likely want to try before they buy.

Gear VR is featured in as many as 18,000 retail stores, with 15,000 of them offering hands-on demos, DiCarlo estimated.

“Trying it and experiencing it and understanding what it really means is super-critical,” he said.

Looking ahead, DiCarlo sees bigger and better things ahead for mobile VR as consumers gain easier access to products that can create and share 360-degree content. Mobile VR will also lend itself to more advanced features such as hand- and position-tracking.

“There’s room for that in mobile, but it will just be on a different time scale,” he said.

HTC started to take pre-orders for the Vive today at 10 a.m. ET, introducing a virtual reality platform that will cost $799 and go head-to-head with the Oculus Rift.

HTC, which has also announced international pricing for the Vive (it’ll fetch C$1,149 in Canada, £689.00 in the U.K., and €899.00 across other parts of Europe, for example), said the pre-order package bundles in three VR titles: Fantastic Contraption, Job Simulator and Tilt Brush, a 3D painting system from Google. The Vive kit will also include two wireless controllers and a 360-degree tracking and room scale movement sensors.

HTC, which is limiting orders to one Vive unit per customer, said it expects to start shipping the Steam VR-powered platform on April 5.

Like the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive users must tether the platform to a high-octane PC (HTC recommends PCs with an Nvidia GeForce GTC 970/AMD Radeon R9 290 equivalent or greater GPU, Intel i5-4590/AMD FX 8350 or greater CPU, at least 4 gigabytes of RAM, and HDMI 1.4 or DisplayPort 1.2 or newer video outputs).

Out of the chute, the HTC Vive will be a bit pricier than the Oculus Rift, which opened preorders on January 6 and starts at $599. Earlier this month, Oculus started to take pre-orders on Oculus-ready PCs and Rift bundles that start at $1,499.

Samsung, meanwhile, is trying to prime the virtual reality pump by bundling the Oculus-powered Gear VR headset with its new Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphones. The Gear VR regularly sells for $99, but is compatible only with select Samsung smartphone models.

Google reportedly is working on at least two new VR platforms -- a smartphone-powered viewer that would be a notch above its Cardboard platform, as well as a self-contained VR headset.

In January, the Consumer Technology Association predicted  that interest in new VR products, such as the Oculus Rift, Gear VR and HTC Vive and coming Sony VR headset for the PS4, will cause unit sales to surge 500% in 2016 and reach 1.2 million units sold. CTA also expects VR to generate $540 million in revenues this year, up 440% from 2015.

Samsung unveiled its new Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphones this week in conjunction with Mobile World Congress and the CE giant will be using virtual reality to pump early sales of its new smartphone lineup.

Consumers who pre-order those new models are in line to get a Gear VR headset, powered by Oculus, along with six VR games from Oculus. The bundle’s worth about $150 – the Samsung Gear VR sells for $99, and the batch of games go for about $50.

Samsung announced the VR tilt as higher end platforms are entering the market, including the Oculus Rift, which starts at $599 and will being shipping in late March. HTC is expected to release pricing on its VR platform, Vive, on Monday (February 29).

Oculus estimates that there are now 200 app and games offered on the Gear VR platform, and that over 1 million hours of 360 video have been watched so far on the platform.

Samsung also amped up the VR angle this week with the introduction of the Gear 360 camera, a device that lets users capture 360 video and upload it to Gear  VR or share on Facebook, which acquired Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion.

Facebook also announced this week that more than 20,000 360-degree videos have been uploaded so far, with “hundreds” being added daily.

The social media giant also said its new “dynamic,” more efficient streaming platform for 360 video with higher-resolution capabilities is coming to Gear VR “in the next few weeks.”  Per this blog post, Facebook is creating dozens of variants of every 360 video that gets uploaded and adjusts the variant that is displayed based on where the viewer is looking.

“By doing this, we’ve quadrupled the resolution quality of 360 streaming video in VR by reducing the amount of required network bandwidth by 4x — so videos look clearer and play faster,” Facebook noted.

The NBA and Turner Sports will expand further into the world of virtual reality when they provide a live VR stream in tandem with opening night matchup between champion Golden State Warriors and the New Orleans Pelicans, scheduled for tonight at 10:30 p.m. ET on TNT.

Along with the live game presentation, viewers will also be able to view the Warriors ring ceremony in VR format on the Oracle Arena court prior to the game itself.

NBA and Turner Sports  are providing the virtual reality experience in partnership with NextVR, a tech firm that specializes in on-demand and live VR.

They said viewers will be able to access the game and the pre-game ceremony in the format with by connecting a Samsung Gear VR headset (pictured)  to the NextVR portal, which if located at the Oculus home app. The Samsung-made headset must be paired with a Samsung Note 4 or Galaxy S6 smartphone. More technical detail on tonight’s VR offering is available here.

http://www.nextvr.com/nba-tnt

The NBA experimented with VR last season when NextVR captured a Warriors game against the Denver Nuggets at Oracle Arena.  Last season, the NBA also offered VR-enabled highlights of the NBA All-Star Game and State Farm All-Star Saturday Night. 

TNT's is tipping off NBA's opening night at 8 p.m. ET with coverage of the Eastern Conference champ Cleveland Cavaliers visiting the Chicago Bulls.