TV shipments to dip in 2021 despite 8K surge – CTA

Following a record 2020 driven by upgrades, television shipments in the US will dip 8%, to 43 million units, in 2021, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) forecasted in its latest "Tech Trends to Watch" study.

CTA's study, released in tandem with this week's all-digital CES, also found that domestic TV sales revenues will decline just 1%, to $22 billion. The CTA expects shipments of very large TVs (70-inches or more) to rise 6%, to 3.3 million units, while shipments of 8K-capable sets will jump 300%, to 1.7 million – still a sliver of total TV shipments.

Among other study categories, CTA expects total spending on video streaming services and software to reach a record $112 billion in 2021, a 11% increase over 2020. The rate of growth will slow, however, as 2020, a year marked by a pandemic that forced people to entertain at home, saw the software and streaming services sector grow by 31% over 2019 totals.

Total retail sales revenues for the US tech industry is slated to grow 4.3%, to $461 billion, the CTA said.

Other nuggets from the CTA study:

In a presentation on the study results streamed Monday, Steve Koenig, VP of research at CTA, said CE product development and innovation is "bunching up" during a period impacted by the pandemic and a broader economic downturn.

"We haven't stood still … we continue to move forward," he added, pointing to an Intelligence of Things – a "new IoT" – that spans AI and machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing and cloud computing.

"Tech demand in the first several months of 2021 will look a lot like the last few months of 2020," Rick Kowalski, director of industry analysis and business intelligence at CTA, said in a statement. "Streaming services, 5G connectivity and digital health devices will push consumer tech forward in the year ahead as innovative technologies prove their resilience during challenging times."

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— Jeff Baumgartner, Senior Editor, Light Reading