Well, I mean, projecting that particular market. I mean as Brian said in his comments as well as I, that the subscription broadcasting market is completely separate from the CE market, I mean, they move, sometimes, in different directions. The results in our subscription broadcasting business have been very strong. In fact, as strong as or maybe even slightly better than we expected for the year 2012; not all the [ph] way through the year.
The consumer business has performed well, it’s a smaller part of our company, but the team there has done a great job, even in a difficult economic environment of producing very good results. The one weak spot has been CE, driven largely by television sales. Most market experts at the beginning of the year were expecting a small bit of growth in TVs this year. It was then downgraded to be flat. It’s now been downgraded twice more to be negative, in terms of unit sales worldwide of televisions.
So as a result of that the -- that’s the one part of our business that’s been difficult, but as I pointed out, if you take a long-term view point, particularly here in the U.S., which is the lead country, what you see is that the market over the last 10 years has grown, on average, 4% and over the 50 years, it’s grown, on average, 4%. What that tells us is that when you go through a period where you have shrinkage, typically you’ll have an offsetting year of growth.
So we don’t see anything underneath the data that says something has fundamentally changed that somehow there has been an upgrade cycle that now will lead to the destruction of the TV market. In fact, every piece of data speaks to quite the opposite. The average American’s watching more TV than ever.
The TVs are getting bigger, brighter, better, thinner and it happens to be that this year -- last year they were flat, this year they will be slightly down, but we don’t see any destruction of the TV market. This has happened before. I guess the best way to say it is I looked at the data going back for decades, 6 times in the last 40 years there have been multiple years of shrinkage in the U.S. TV market.
And everybody in those periods that predicted the TV market was dead were wrong, because in the years following those years of shrinkage, it regressed back to the mean. So the growth rate over time has been 4%. We’ve gone through last year, roughly flat this year, shrinking. We don’t really -- it doesn’t really dampen our spirits about the AV market, just -- we’re just happening to be going through a difficult year.