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

AV collaboration is booming — that’s the word from Futuresource Consulting, the company that tracks this data. 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 about $2.6 billion in total revenue for hardware, room hubs, collaboration displays and pure-software solutions.

One area that’s clear to us at THE rAVe Agency is that software-based systems are going to play a bigger part in the market. Up until mid-2019, Barco’s ClickShare has enjoyed better than a 55 percent market share (when you include their now-defunct wePresent brand) the entire time of its existence in the market starting in 2012 — when they launched and had a nearly 100 percent market share. They enjoyed a market share greater than 80 percent until 2017 when it was clear that products form Extron (ShareLink), Crestron (AirMedia) and other hardware-based companies. But, since 2017, there have been a deluge of new hardware and software-based solutions and new lines from Vivitek, BenQ and an upstart called ScreenBeam (making their debut at InfoComm 2019) will further erode Barco’s market share.

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 says that collaboration and WPS is 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 forward, Futuresource expects there to be wide-scale 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.

Long-term, we at THE rAVe Agency feel that, eventually, you will see screen sharing built into most displays — likely by the end of 2023. The only question is whose technology will win out.

The Futuresource report is here.

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