AV, Presentation & Display

Streaming Media Dominates Pro-AV

U.S. AV Market to Continue Steady Growth through 2022

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 08/31/17

The professional audio-video industry in the United States generated $65 billion in 2016 after a contraction the previous year, and will continue to grow to $83 billion in 2022, according to InfoComm International's 2017 AV Industry Outlook and Trends Analysis (IOTA) report.

The United States is the largest AV market in the world, worth almost $53 billion las year, and will continue to grow at a 4 percent annual rate on average through 2022, according to the report. That growth will ensure that the U.S. continues to dominate the region of the Americas throughout the forecast period.

"Over the current forecast horizon, pro-AV industry value will increase by over 4 percent year-on-year, on average," according to the report. "No other macro region exhibits as strong a dependence on a single market as does the Americas; the U.S. accounted for more than $8 of every $10 spent on pro AV in the Americas."

The report calls for the U.S. to account for 80 percent of spending in the region through 2022.

Streaming media, storage and distribution (SMSD) platforms accounted for just more than a quarter, 26 percent, of pro-AV spend in the Americas last year, at $17 billion. The segment dominates pro-AV spending because the storage and recovery aspects of SMSD protect media assets and because the growing amount of media produced increases demand for platforms to store and protect them, according to IOTA.

Services were the second-largest segment in 2016, at $13 billion and one-fifth of total spending for the Americas. The segment is predicted to grow by 3 percent throughout the forecast.

One segment that will see fast growth over the course of the forecast period is video displays. Currently accounting for 8 percent of the market at $5 billion in 2016, the report predicts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11 percent for a total of $9.7 billion in 2022.

Environmental products will also see fast growth, riding a 19 percent CAGR to move from 6 percent of spending now to 12 percent by the end of the forecast.

Video projection, however, is forecast to continue a dive dating back to 2014. In that year, projection accounted for more than 15 percent of the pro-AV market. By 2016, it accounted for just 11 percent and by 2022 will make up only 3 percent of the total market, according to the report. Projection will lose value the fastest in the Americas, losing 15 percent of its value each year, on average.

The largest single product or service in the industry is media servers, which account for 17 percent of the total pro-AV market in the Americas. Spending on servers will grow at an average of 4 percent annually throughout the forecast, which is good enough to maintain the leading market share, though not the fastest growth of any product or service.

The fastest growth will be in lighting fixtures, currently accounting for 4 percent of the market but ready to grow at a CAGR of 24 percent through 2022, when it will account for 10 percent of the market in the Americas. That growth will be driven by LED integrations with smart building systems and the integration of more lighting into AV corporate, retail and transportation AV systems.

"AV installation and integration is the market's second-largest category," according to the report. "It generated $8.3 billion in 2016, and will grow by over 4 percent year-on-year through 2022, to over $10 billion."

Control systems accounted for $2.3 billion last year and are forecast to grow 11 percent each year to reach $4.3 billion in 2022.

Projection screens, projector accessories and projectors will be the products that see the most decline, contracting 14-17 percent each year throughout the forecast.

To read the full report visit, infocomm.org.