Competitive Product Ranking: Picking A Winning Set-Top Box

Between 2007 and 2008, manufacturers announced or deployed significant new set-top box products, each of them building on slightly different assets but all targeting the same goal — establishing an early foothold in at least a million living rooms. Because this technology is very immature and still at the starting line, Forrester ran six competing new set-top boxes through its competitive consumer technology product ranking tool. Our assessment predicts that all the set tops on the market will struggle to overcome significant barriers, even if they serve significant consumer needs; however, we pick the Netflix Player by Roku as the likely unit leader. In the end, the future of the set-top box is not a box at all but a video service that will serve multiple boxes as well as video devices like TV sets and DVD players.