
Tough competition ahead for Apple with launch of new devices…
Published: 22 September 2004 09:15 GMT
The worldwide market for MP3 players will hit$58bn by 2008, according to a new study by IDC.
The impending competition that awaits Apple's extremely popular iPod music player is the focus of the IDC study. The market researcher said several vendors are set to launch portable jukeboxes based on 1-inch or smaller hard drives, which could pose a tough challenge to iPod.
The biggest growth in MP3 players should come from portable flash players, the IDC report predicted. The volume of flash players shipped will jump to 50 million units in 2008, up from 12.5 million in 2003. Other segments will grow modestly.
In particular, the portable and home-based MP3 CD/MiniDisc player categories will be hurt by slowness in the overall markets for those devices and by falling prices for rival portable flash and jukebox devices.
Those falling prices, along with the increasing availability of music from legitimate online music providers, will drive demand for compressed audio players, IDC said.
Growth in the overall audio player market will provide "new opportunities" for chip vendors, device manufacturers and paid music service providers, IDC analyst Susan Kevorkian said in a statement.
Also aiding the growth will be the eagerness shown by companies to integrate compressed audio support as a secondary feature in a variety of digital devices, such as DVD players and game consoles. Recently, Hitachi released a new, leaner hard drive that is easy to integrate with consumer electronics devices.
A lot of high level fluff without depth of resear...
Frank Myers
IDC's estimate of a $58bn market in 2008 is not cr...
Martin Taylor
Recent Electronics Engineering Graduates with Audio / Music interests ? Bright, motivated recent Electronics graduates with some Electronics design ...
They also will be energetic team players with a sound understanding of the needs of a modern ‘Sales 2.0’ process Packages will be around ...
Designing, creating, supervision and editing original audio content and In-game implementation of all types of audio assets using state of the art ...
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