For the second straight quarter, Cisco edged out Motorola as the top cable set-top box market share leader.

Infonetics Research said in a recent report that worldwide set-top box (STB) revenue was essentially flat in the third quarter of this year, totaling $3.7 billion. The IP set-top box segment grew the most during the third quarter, with revenue up 27 percent over the preceding quarter. Infonetics also said that 45 percent of all set-top boxes shipped had HD capabilities.

“We increased our long-term overall STB forecast, due mainly to a pickup in the pace of cable and satellite STB shipments in the Asia Pacific region, principally in China and India; Infonetics expects the global STB market to grow to $16.6 billion in 2016,” said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst for broadband access and pay-TV at Infonetics Research.

In a separate report, Infonetics took a look at the video infrastructure market, which will get a boost next year from multi-screen services.

“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,” Heynen said. “We expect a noticeable jump in video equipment spending in 2013.”

Highlights from the VOD and encoder report included:

• Infonetics has increased its long-term forecast for the overall video infrastructure market to $1.1 billion by 2016, as operators worldwide migrate to MPEG-4 HD encoders to support higher picture quality using less bandwidth and as multi-screen services take off.
• For the third quarter, VOD and encoder equipment revenue fell 3 percent compared to the previous quarter, with all regions declining by single digits.
• Following two consecutive quarters of declines, spending on VOD and streaming content servers grew 2 percent in the third quarter.
• Infonetics forecasts the number of IPTV subscribers to nearly double between 2012 and 2016, from 83 million to 165 million worldwide.