Global Lease Revenues for Commercial Satellite Capacity to Hit $7.3-B in 2010, Says Northern Sky Research

ORLANDO, Fla., Aug. 3, 2005/Satnews Daily/ — Northern Sky Research (NSR) said on Tuesday demand for commercial C- and Ku-band capacity is growing at an average annual rate of 3.1%, and the total number of leased transponders should exceed 4,950 in 2010, up from 4,125 as of the end of 2004.

According to NSR’s newest market survey and forecast report "Global Assessment of Satellite Demand: A Demand-Driven, Region-Specific Analysis of the Commercial Geostationary Satellite Transponder Market for 2004-2010,” demand for C-band capacity is flat to declining in half of the regional markets investigated in detail, and the real engine for growth in most markets will be the lease of commercial Ku-band capacity for video distribution, Direct-to-Home (DTH) and emerging satellite broadband services.

“NSR projects that, on a global basis, for every new transponder of C-band capacity leased, ten Ku-band transponders will be placed under contract,” said Patrick French, senior analyst for NSR and author of the report.

To reach this conclusion, NSR structured the study such that in excess of 100 individual demand forecasts were performed in order to provide the detailed wealth of information the commercial satellite industry requires to successfully grow within an ever more competitive marketplace. Separate regional C- and Ku-band demand forecasts were performed for each of the major satellite applications investigated in the study.

These applications included the three cited above, in addition to video contribution & OUTV, telephony & carrier, narrowband VSAT and a group of other niche satellite services. NSR primarily utilized a bottom-up approach to build its market assessment for each of the following regional markets: North America, Central America & Caribbean, South America, the Atlantic Ocean Region, Western Europe, Central & Eastern Europe, the Middle East & North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Ocean Region.

A key finding from the study is that 61% of all leased commercial capacity was for video services and, illustrating the importance this segment to the world's satellite operators, NSR estimates that 64% of all leased capacity will be for video uses by 2010.

“In the last year, NSR saw the number of standard definition channels carried on the world's satellites increase by 16.5%, rising from 9,138 in 2003 to 10,650 in 2004,” states French.  “Further, HD is emerging rapidly, and NSR anticipates that the number of full-time HD channels carried on commercial satellites will nearly quadruple by the end of 2006.”

Beyond NSR's own assessment of the market, this study is seen as a tool to be used by its clients in their own assessments of the market. For this reason, NSR includes all of the study data in Excel files, along with a point-by-point forecast methodology, which allows the study's users to manipulate the data to suit their own internal forecast needs and their view of how each separate satellite application will develop in the twelve distinct regional markets.

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