This is the third in a series of posts reviewing excerpts of the 2018 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS) .
Previous articles about the 2018 BBS reviewed the most commercially important trends and the ranking of customer opinions of their technology suppliers.
This article discusses the specific product categories being evaluated for purchase in 2018 by our global sample of media professionals. As part of the 2018 BBS, several thousand respondents in more than 120 countries indicated the products they were currently evaluating for purchase.
To gather product level feedback, we presented research participant with a list of 38 relevant product categories and asked to indicate which ones they are currently evaluating for purchase.
The results are shown in the chart below.
The position of a product in the above chart is illustrative of several market dynamics. Certain products are purchased by a larger set of market participants such as Video Editing when compared to a product category like Transmitters or Newsroom Systems. The latter are purchased by a much narrower set of media professionals.
Another explanation for lower evaluation levels is the comparatively earlier stage of adoption, as is likely the case with object-based storage and to a lesser extent with the Public Cloud (a longer discussion is planned in an upcoming post). Greater levels of adoption of IP-based infrastructure could very well explain how the evaluation levels of IT Switch / Routers has now surpassed SDI Routing Switchers.
The position of product categories in the above may also reflect the relative number of individuals involved in the purchase decision. The ultimate purchase decision for a Blade Server may sit with a single individual at a Broadcaster whereas Media Asset Management is a much more collective purchase evaluation for a Broadcast engineering group.
Especially when comparing against prior years, there is strong evidence of a general increase in the purchase levels of several product categories. Microphone have generally seen high purchase volumes, but the 2018 levels are even further elevated perhaps owing to recent and ongoing frequency reallocations in several geographies.
Correlating with commercially important trends suggests the continued impact of multi-platform content delivery is driving interest in related products and services such as online / streaming video delivery platforms and encoding / transcoding.
Of course, reasonable people can look at the same data and draw different conclusions. Before reaching a firm conclusion, I would advise interested parties to consider related data points such as budget levels, budgeted projects, and adoption levels of associated technologies such as UHD or IP-based infrastructure. This data is available in the Big Broadcast Survey reports available for purchase.
The information in this article is based on select findings from the 2018 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), a global study of broadcast industry trends, technology purchasing plans, and benchmarking of broadcast technology vendor brands. Several thousand broadcast professionals in 100+ countries took part in the 2018 BBS, making it the largest and most comprehensive market study ever conducted in the broadcast industry.
Unless otherwise specified, all data in this article measures the responses of all non-supplier participants in the 2018 BBS, regardless of factors such as organization type, organization size, job title, purchasing and geographic location. Please be aware that responses of individual organization types or geographic locations may be very different. Granular analysis of these results is available as part of various paid-for reports based on the 2018 BBS data set. For more information about this report, please contact Devoncroft Partners.
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