Telecom Lead Asia: Growth in global set-top box (STB) revenue was flat in third quarter of 2012 at $3.7 billion.

Cisco is leading the cable set-top box market share leader for the second straight quarter.

Google-owned Motorola is the second largest player.

The IP set-top box segment grew the most in 3Q12, with revenue up 27 percent from the previous quarter.

45 percent of all set-top boxes shipped now have HD capabilities.

Infonetics Research on Thursday said it increased its long-term overall STB forecast, due mainly to a pick up in the pace of cable and satellite STB shipments in the Asia Pacific region, principally in China and India. Infonetics now expects the global STB market to grow to $16.6 billion in 2016.

“Operators are being extremely cautious with their video infrastructure spending right now, looking to sweat their assets as much as they can knowing that a spending spree looms on the horizon to support more unicast and multi-screen services, including RS-DVR, start-over, look-back, and streaming delivery to mobile devices,” said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband access and pay TV at Infonetics Research.

Meanwhile, Infonetics has also increased its forecast for the overall video infrastructure market to $1.1 billion by 2016, as operators migrate to MPEG-4 HD encoders to support higher picture quality using less bandwidth and as multi-screen services take off.

For the quarter, VOD and encoder equipment revenue fell 3 percent in 3Q12 from 2Q12, with all regions declining by single digits.

Following 2 consecutive quarters of declines, spending on VOD and streaming content servers grew 1.8 percent in 3Q12.

Infonetics forecasts the number of IPTV subscribers to nearly double between 2012 and 2016, from 83 million to 165 million worldwide.

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