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- After just 97 releases in 2006, volumes rose to 461 titles in 2007, increasing to 554 in 2008. With the debut of such services as Nintendo's DSiware, 2009 is on course to be the biggest year yet. Release volumes are tracking 40% growth for the first half of the year, on 2008. If this is maintained until year-end, 2009 will see over 750 full-game download releases.

- Some of this year's biggest successes include such titles as Battlefield 1943 and Castle Crashers on XBLA, each of which retail above the norm for the service. Taken in tandem with the launch of Microsoft's Games on Demand service, selling full retail-equivalent titles, the ASPs for the online console marketplace are also due to rise.

- The most aggressive publisher activity has been from Nintendo and Sony, understandably, given their first-party status and cavernous back catalogues. They're followed by two former hardware manufacturers, Sega and Hudson, underscoring the opportunity offered by Online Console in providing a marketplace for content that's long vacated the shelves of physical retailers.

However, our research also reveals that global active online TV consoles will reach a healthy 79 million devices by end of 2012, offering publishers and developers a massive online addressable market to approach before the end of this generation of consoles. Although the users of these devices are expected to become increasingly active in downloading games content, they are only forecast to spend an annual $1.2bn in full games downloads by the same year, an important but still small 11% of the total current generation console game opportunity, a market still dominated by packaged media.

While online console revenues will also be generated through add-on content, micro-transactions, advertising and service subscriptions, the relatively small scale of these revenue streams and the timescales involved in their development indicates that it won't be until the next generation of consoles that the online console market is comprehensively commercially exploited to its full potential.

At launch, our service offers coverage of Xbox, Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii, including the Xbox Live marketplace itself. Addressable market, broken into active online consoles, active online accounts and active account owners, is available for all aforementioned formats, split across a number of territories, including UK, France, Germany, Italy, Nordic, Japan, USA and World. Similar service is provided for volumes and revenues of full-game download transactions, aggregated into workbooks that summarise such measures as growth, net additions and buy rates.

Further coverage is offered for Xbox, Xbox 360 and Xbox Live, via figures for service subscriptions – subscriptions that provide users with ongoing access with online features such as stores and multiplayer functionality. On a format basis, where relevant, this data can be found in the 'By platforms' section of Games Intelligence; for countries, it can be found under 'By territory'. All data is stored under the 'Online console' section heading within these folders. Furthermore, a 256-bit total has been added to 'By platforms', summarising data for Xbox 360, Wii and PS3, as well as a separate entry for Xbox Live within the 'Online' folder.

Future content will expand to cover handheld gaming devices, in the form of PlayStation Portable, PSPgo, Nintendo DSi, which will extend to umbrella-style coverage for PlayStation Network and Wi-Fi Connection marketplaces. Territories to be incorporated include Canada and North America, as well as breakouts of Austria & Switzerland, Nordic, Spain & Portugal and Benelux.

The Online Console service will also be broadening its content in other regards. The transaction business model coverage will eventually encompass game-expansion purchases (such as new levels, and other elements that increase play time) and 'other' purchases (to include virtual items). Our subscription consideration will expand to MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) subscriptions, too.