The good news: Cord-cutting has diminished the global use of power-hungry pay TV set-top boxes, as well as the grid-taxing network infrastructure these cable, satellite and telco video systems are based on. 

The bad news? While energy consumption by the global video business has ebed a bit recently, it's set to spike anew thanks to the power-intensive nature of unicast streaming, the Rethink Technology Research said. 

The UK research company believes that spike will start at around 2027.

“It appears that our industry is at a turning point when it comes to the energy use required for video distribution and consumption across the world,” the company said in its latest report. “The decline of pay TV -- cable in particular –--and its power-hungry network infrastructure means that for the past few years, the energy consumption of video overall has been tapering downwards.

“However, a rise in OTT video consumption means that streaming infrastructure is scaling up, while viewing is fragmenting across a broadening range of consumer electronics,” Rethink's report added. “Both trends are creating demand for energy that has already overtaken that of pay TV networks, and will soon begin to reverse the downward slope of the current global energy requirements for video distribution and consumption.”

The pay TV set-top isn’t necessarily going away. But it is entering a new global era in which countless video operating systems will be whittled down to a precious few. And Google’s Android TV platform will emerge the clear world leader.

That’s the conclusion of Rethink Technology Research’s latest report, How to Survive the Set-top Box Endgame.

"Android TV, RDK and a handful of other specialist smart TV OSs will come to the fore, mostly at the expense of generic Linux variants, plus a new entry out of China as the U.S. China trade war eliminates what would have been dominance there on Android in favor of Huawei’s Harmony, which will eventually make the transition from Smart TV OS, to full bloodied set tops,” the report reads.

Also read: Google Developing Android TV-based Chromecast with Its Own Remote: Report

Android TV will have its biggest growth in the Asia-Pacific region over the next five years, surging past 160 million deployed devices, Rethink Technology predicts. In the U.S., it’s growth will be curtailed by Reference Design Kit (RDK), a conglomerate that includes Comcast, Liberty Global and other cable companies, and which specifies an open software stack for pay TV set-tops and other customer premises equipment.

Rethink Technology credits RDK with several key recent moves. Among them was integrating getting close to Metrological, which operates an app destination that provides a similar function to Google’s Play Store. Comcast even purchased the Dutch tech company last year.

“Meanwhile, Huawei’s HarmonyOS will become a major force in China, not due to its merits, but due to China needing independence from US toolsets,” Rethink said in its report. "It will take 28% of set top OSs there, against 14% still going to Android TV, and in the rest of Asia Android’s progress will only be held in check by proprietary OSs of big two, Samsung and LG, at least on smart TVs. HarmonyOS will also take 75% of China’s smart TV OS market by 2025.”

In less than three year’s time, Google has made massive inroads in the global pay TV business for the operator tier version of Android TV. The OS provides a simple means to let users tap into Netflix, YouTube or pretty much any OTT app they want via Google Play. It also provides a next-generation voice-control experience with access to Google Assistant. This lets operators provide a modern video experience without incurring any tech development costs.

Google enjoys far less penetration in the global OTT device business with Android TV. But it does have some juice in regard to its Chromecast streaming dongle, which controls 11% of the U.S. OTT device market. Google is reportedly working on a new version of Chromecast based on Android TV. 

Subscription video on demand (SVoD) is projected to pull even with broadcast TV globally in hours viewing per day by 2023, according to a new report from Rethink Technology Research, with Netflix getting a big chunk of that influx.

Rethink projects that the current 478 million SVoD subs will grow to 743 million by 2023, with North America driving the largest volume of subscription dollars, going from 146.5 million subs to over 236 million by that date. It says that will accelerate the "drift" of traditional TV advertising to the internet. 

That is based on an assumption that each year SVoD service subs will watch a half-hour more per day annually. It predicts (see graph) that current broadcast TV hours watched in 2018 in the U.S. is about five billion per day and SVoD is about a billion per day, with the two lines meeting at about three billion each per day in 2013.

Netflix is predicted to claim over a quarter of SVoD subs worldwide by then (194 million or 26%), but decrease its share of the U.S. SVoD market from 44% to 31% as more over-the-top services grab some of those eyeballs. Up-and-comers include WarnerMedia under AT&T's "freemium strategy," says Rethink, while it predicts Disney will deliver on multiple SVoD services.

Netflix has taken an hour per day away from traditional TV in the U.S., says Rethink, and if that trend continues, and Amazon and Hulu and others each take an hour, then a half-hour more each year, over half of advertising viewing on TV disappears.

"Each SVoD manages to get more viewing time per home, every quarter," says Rethink in explaining its prediction. "If you simply assume that each SVoD subscription begins taking one hour per day, and then a year later takes 1.5 hours, all the way up to 3 hours a day, you get this (above) graph. The forecast numbers we have done for the SVoDs are all new, but they are consistent with other research firms." 

Rethink based the report on a list of active SVODs, then "establishing pricing points for service, and subscribers numbers from public reports, executive addresses and press materials and where possible by speaking to SVoD players.