Commercial Content Sharing Booms, as Shipments Hit 1 Million in 2018

In the midst of the major changes taking place with working habits, the market for commercial content sharing and in-room collaboration is booming. With organisations keen to promote creativity amongst employees and workplaces seeing a growth of more spontaneous and collaborative work sessions, the market for in-room wireless presentation solutions is seeing rapid growth.

In fact, according to the latest Wireless Presentations Solutions (WPS) Market Report from Futuresource Consulting, WPS passed a major milestone in 2018 with shipments reaching 1 million units for the first time. This equates to a substantial value of $2.6 billion and reflects the strong employee demand for WPS spanning from hardware, room hubs, collaboration displays and pure-software solutions.

Anthony Brennan, Market Analyst at Futuresource Consulting, elaborated further on this hot collaboration trend, stating that, “Opportunity is certainly knocking across all commercial content sharing solutions. The continued success and high growth rates in 2018 highlight a possible watershed moment for screen sharing, with demand in government, enterprises, schools and universities truly taking off and vendors across the market enjoying rapid increases in year-on-year volumes.”

Futuresource has been researching the pro audio visual (AV) supply chain for over 20 years and the WPS landscape presents a high-growth product category in this industry. During the past few years, Futuresource has invested heavily into understanding the key players, dynamics and impact of this market and, in the process, has more than doubled the number of brands included in its 2019 report. From a geographical perspective, China’s growing importance in this market cannot be ignored, both as a manufacturing hub and significant marketplace for solutions. As a result of this, Futuresource has spent considerable time understanding the Chinese market and its wider impact on worldwide volumes.

Moving forwards, Futuresource expects there to be widescale disruption both from cheap entry level solutions as well as the growing range of competing technologies seeing screen sharing being built in as an additional, and fairly common, feature.

“In essence, this is both a rapidly growing and intensely competitive market, with major international players like Cisco entering in 2018 and consumer solutions like Google Chromecast and Apple Airplay shaping expectations for similar workplace experiences. Despite this, there is no shortage of demand for these devices with volume and value expected to continue growing at least in the medium term,” added Brennan.

About the author

Adam Cox

Adam Cox is Senior Analyst at Futuresource Consulting and is responsible for researching and reporting on technology trends across the imaging, pro video and collaboration market categories.

Adam is also heavily involved in work looking at end users, service providers across the corporate markets and in addition to this, works on tracking and examining the collaboration, wireless presentation and conferencing equipment sales channels.

Adam joined Futuresource in 2006 working on broad range of market tracking, analytical and strategic pro broadcast AV Projects. He soon went onto lead the broadcast equipment team covering the full broadcast production chain from acquisition to content delivery. Adam holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Film and Television Studies.