The arrival of LE Audio is set to transform the Bluetooth® audio ecosystem over the next five-to-ten years. Arguably, the most significant new capability enabled by the release of LE Audio is Auracast™ broadcast audio. Thanks to LE Audio’s broadcast capabilities, audio transmitters can broadcast one or several audio streams to an unlimited number of Auracast™ receivers, such as headsets and hearing aids. This will help create new ways to interact with our environments, improve visitor experiences, and offer scalable assistive listening solutions that could eventually supersede existing options and open up wider accessibility for people with hearing loss.
Recently, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) partnered with ABI Research to outline the potential trends and impacts Auracast™ broadcast audio will have on the market. The following excerpt is from the published Bluetooth market research note: LE Audio: The Future of Bluetooth® Audio.
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LE Audio: The Future of Bluetooth® Audio
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New Market Opportunities Enabled by Auracast™ Broadcast Audio
Opportunities for Auracast™ broadcast audio are enormous with the technology envisioned to be leveraged across a wide number of public locations. This could include conference and lecture halls, theatres and cinemas, airports and transportation hubs, museums, places of worship, and, eventually, in one-to-one type deployments within retail and other service environments. According to the World Health Organization, over 1.5 billion people globally (nearly 20 percent of the population) live with hearing loss. This is anticipated to grow to 2.5 billion as early as 2050. LE Audio has the potential to significantly build upon and complement existing assistive listening solutions and open up Auracast™ broadcast audio to many new venues and regions that currently have limited or no assistive listening infrastructure.
Auracast™ Broadcast Audio Market Forecasts
Given where we are in the development timeline of LE Audio and Auracast™ broadcast audio, it is still early to establish concrete forecasts on how rapidly the industry will adopt LE Audio across both the transmitter and receiver devices, alongside Auracast™ broadcast audio deployments within public locations, and other enterprise use cases. The speed of the rollout of LE Audio solutions in the source and sink devices will have a direct impact on the deployment of Auracast™ broadcast audio solutions in public venues. As the LE Audio source and sink installed base grows, so too will the opportunities for Auracast™ broadcast audio solutions to be increasingly deployed.
In order to understand the potential addressable market for Auracast™ broadcast audio, ABI Research has developed a forecasting model based on global venue market sizing built from a regional model of establishments combined with projected adoption of Auracast™ broadcast audio solutions across different use cases. Here, we have taken into account anticipated penetration across different regions, different timelines for different use cases, and different numbers of transmitters per deployment based on building sizes and the number of potential buildings / rooms per establishment.
According to ABI Research, there are just over 61 million establishments globally that could take advantage of Auracast™ broadcast audio. By 2030, this number will increase to 64 million thanks to new building growth. However, as Chart 4 previously demonstrated, it will take some time for the ecosystem of LE Audio source and sink devices to develop. ABI Research expects the major inflection point to occur around 2025. Thereafter, there will be additional incentive for venues to start deploying Auracast™ broadcast audio. By this point, the technology will be more familiar, transmitter devices will be more readily available, and the installed base of LE Audio-enabled devices will have reached a critical mass. Therefore, ABI Research expects a more rapid deployment of Auracast™ broadcast audio solutions towards the end of the decade.
As Chart 6 shows, in this early phase of development, ABI Research expects silent TVs and augmented / assistive listening in public venues to drive Auracast™ broadcast audio adoption. In public assembly buildings, all five major use cases will be relevant; however, by 2030 the majority will come from silent TV screens, assistive listening, and multi-language support. Religious worship will primarily be assistive listening use cases, while restaurants will primarily be silent TV screens in bars and other venues. ABI Research also expects that many other innovative ways of deploying Auracast™ broadcast audio will emerge for both assistive listening and augmented hearing applications over the next decade
To learn more about how LE Audio will help establish new use cases and consumer experiences, open the audio ecosystem to new industry players, and enable the Bluetooth audio market to scale to new heights, read the full report: LE Audio: The Future of Bluetooth® Audio.
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LE Audio: The Future of Bluetooth® Audio
See how the arrival of LE Audio is set to transform the Bluetooth audio ecosystem and the impact it will have on Bluetooth® audio market forecasts.