While the golden age of the set top is over and the industry is in managed decline, device shipments are holding up better than expected and the battle over their software foundations has intensified.

Operators now face a strategic crossroads. They must either double down on the set top — with all the platform, UX, and capex implications that entails — or chart a course toward full app-based service delivery.

This report offers the tools to inform that decision.

What comes next is not a question of technology alone – it is a matter of strategy, execution, and timing, in the final decade of the set top era. These transitional years will require careful navigation of legacy infrastructure, changing consumer behavior, and divergent regional trends. This transformation will sweep across Pay TV operators, CPE vendors, chipset providers, middleware developers, UI/UX integrators, and the OTT platforms that increasingly coexist alongside (or replace) operator deployments.

The report provides a detailed global forecast of set top shipments and installed base by operating system, including Android TV, AOSP, RDK, Linux, HarmonyOS, and tvOS. It also offers region-by-region analysis, spotlighting the variations in deployment models and OS preferences.

As the traditional hardware-software stack unravels, the OS decisions made now will shape not only future device economics, but also the very nature of operator-customer relationships.

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