The over-the-top (OTT) market is keeping many traditional companies awake at night as they continue to take market shares from telecoms, cable and entertainment companies. Telcos already lost $33 billion in SMS revenues last year, and that total is set to grow to $54 billion by 2016. A new report by Research and Markets looks at the future of the OTT market across different segments with the goal of shedding light on the market by content and access type around the world.

The content is text/image, audio and video, while the access type are the different devices consumers use, which include smartphones, tablets, laptops/desktops, set top boxes, smart TVs and gaming consoles.

This report consists of current trends and competition, insights of various market components, driving trends and forecast for the period 2014-2019. It includes sub-segments and verticals for markets in North America (NA), Europe (EU), Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America (LA).

According to the report the OTT market has a lot of potential for growth because of all the different regions around the world it brings together. This platform is seen as a vehicle for enterprises to penetrate these new markets without the capital expenditures of traditional companies. This technology overcomes the barriers of traditional infrastructure and provides the ability to deliver smooth flow of services at much lower price points.

The services with OTT can be applied vertically such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), media and entertainment, IT and telecom, education, households, and healthcare segments. Some of the high growth markets are media and entertainment vertical, healthcare vertical and households.

Some of the challenges the reports highlights include lagging network performance, low rate of monetization of user base and an extremely competitive field from many new emerging players around the world.Companies mentioned in the report include, Akamai (News - Alert) Technologies, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.

Because OTT technology relies on the infrastructure of the legacy service providers, they are very much dependent on them to provide their service. Considering the issues surrounding net neutrality it might not be inconceivable for these companies to give preference to their product over others.