A fellow cyni....I mean realist speaks on the digital home

Link: Digital media entrepreneur thinks connected home still a decade away.

I love this guy.  10 years until we have a real connected digital home!  Finally a contrarian out there getting quoted.  He's right--at least directionally.  The future is surely five or more years away.  Home networking standards are duking it out and remain unproven in real life, at least for video delivery.  Wireless, wireline, no new wires, etc.  The average consumer doesn't have a vast digital library--teenagers are starting to, and it's going to be a few years until they start tricking out their homes with media servers.  Companies like Netflix have not figured out how to reach the masses with downloaded video, and while they might try to reach out very soon, execution might be poor.  Between content, consumer interest and savvy, and marketing plans, there is a lot to be figured out.

Comments

[Neil Hendin]

I think it will depend on whose home we are talking about. Some will converge sooner than others.

Two generations ago one still had to get up and change the channel (from 2-13 in some cases). Today we have TiVo's, digital cable, digital answering machines, remote garage door openers, electronic control of the lawn sprinklers, etc... The current iPod generation will demand digital converged media. None of these are revolutionary, but they are all a way that technology creeps into the home in various different ways that we dont necessarily notice.

What is really missing is the integration of all of these in a unified way. It has been hard for the industry to manage the integration of media that is already digital, we just have our toe in the water of converged media devices, like the video iPod, TiVo with the home media extensions, MythTV type devices, or Windows MCE to allow the use of digital content in a unified way. This is likely the first wave of home technology that we will see. Why not integrate an ethernet port in a home stereo receiver like some manufacturers are already doing.

The rest of the home, is too, well analog to get easily pulled in in the first wave, but will happen eventually.

I believe that it will take two major things to accelerate it's development. The first is one of telemetry, a common interconnect between various devices and a home PC is needed. It is no use putting a digital thermometer in the refridgerator to monitor the temperature if you can't get the data out. This could be done over X10 or other powerline networking standards (the data rates are usually quite low for control and metering) so it could eventually be low cost. But the catch is that all manufacturers have to comply with some standards. If your lighting system speaks one protocol, your popcorn maker another, and home theater system another still, you wont be able to just sit down, push a button and start a movie, while the lights fade down, and the popcorn is fresh. Granted that there are ways that people have been able to do all of this so far (minus the popcorn maker as far as I know) but they are tech savvy and willing to hack around with it.

The second, and perhaps bigger hurdle is one of user interface. Most of us dont want to interface to our home, just to live in it. A rather tech-savvy engineer colleague of mine moved into a house with a pretty sophisticated home control system, and he is still exploring how to use it after several days. In their case it is not one of ability, the individual is brilliant, but one of desire to avoid complexity at home, since there is enough elsewhere in life. I think this is an intresting area for development, one of UI design, usability which borders on architecture in the sense that they have to create spaces in which one can live comfortably.

This point about UI also applies to media convergence too, if you have a media server that makes it hard to find content, you wont use it to it's full extent.

[Barbara French]

I appreciate that you're looking at this in terms of infotainment and content ecosystems and home networking technology market penetration.

I think another core question is whether we should permit our homes to become "smart" or "digital" -- beyond networked entertainment -- before we, as a society, catch up with how to balance the rights of the individual with our ability to embed, distribute and interconnect intelligence (as silicon, M2M, nano technologies, etc.) throughout our homes, offices and lives.

The kind of "user generated content" that is going to come out of digital homes is very personal and comprehensive. It is likely to change the fabric of digital societies -- for better, or for worse. It sure seems like we need more time to figure out the implications and safeguards, given the track record for personal privacy/security with satellites, PCs, phones, email, and the Internet.