App-tastic Future for Retail Cable Boxes

摘要

There axe many reasons why the cable industry thinks the road to the retail future of set-tops and other video devices will be paved by apps. About 469 million of them, in fact. That's an estimate of the number of retail devices (a group that includes tablets, PCs, smart TVs, gaming consoles, streaming players and smartphones) in the U.S. that can currently be served by a multichannel video programming distributor, according to data (see table) recently presented by CableLabs chief technology officer Ralph Brown in a blog post, with findings based on several sources, including U.S. Census Bureau reports, The State of the Tablet Market, and a recent connected-TV study from eMarketer.