The Digital Living Room Is Coming Soon…?
By Mark Levy CEO of MaxxoMedia
The vision of the digital living room has been around a long time. This is where the living room and Internet collide centered around a screen (namely the TV) and information, video, audio, games, and communications all converge. Over the years, attempts have been made to bring this vision to reality mostly with lukewarm results. Anyone remember WebTV?
At a recent gathering just outside of San Francisco, this vision was discussed. The talks centered around three main topics: 1) What will the interfaces to this digital living room look like? 2) When will this vision become a reality? And 3) How will the various parties, from cable operators and content providers to ad agencies, hardware manufacturers and even consumers make money in this new world?
Attendees included representatives from across the digital living room landscape — the usual suspects such as Comcast, Verizon, HP and Microsoft to the upstarts and start-ups like Hillcrest Labs, HDD Disk Flix and SendToMyTV — mixed for a day-and-a-half discussing how each of them will make the future come to life.
It was soon clear that this vision was further away than anyone would admit. Some commented that the topics and problems at this conference have remained the same for years, moving forward each year only incrementally, if at all.
However, others saw progress, which lead them to believe the manna was going to start falling soon. The evidence towards this convergent possibility is the massive increase in people watching video, short and long form, over the Internet on their PCs and laptops, and the increase in broadband speeds to the home. Over 10 billion streams of video were initiated over the web in January of 2008.
The question was raised about how the consumer would be paying for all this content. Currently almost all of this video viewing is ad-supported … thus cash-free to the consumer. This ad revenue needs to get split between the distributor and the content provider. Unfortunately, ad agencies aren’t clear exactly how to measure this new medium, so they have little to show their clients as support for moving their budgets into the new world.
Cable companies want to maintain a walled garden approach to offering content, so they are concerned with how and when to allow their customers to access content from the Internet.
On the set top box side, TiVo, a pioneer in intelligent set top boxes, continues to be one of the more progressive companies in the space. With the luxury of having a proprietary set top box in millions of homes, they have expanded the digital video recorder to allow their customers to access parts of the Internet, like Amazon UnBox, in their living room.
The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 have a large installed base of boxes that have the potential to shift the landscape dramatically. The 360 comes equipped with a network connection that allow consumers to access the Internet, play games in real time with others, download movies, TV shows and play HD movies. The PlayStation is rumored to be adding a video download store soon.
With the expectation of massive amounts of content being available through Internet TV, companies are facing off around the consumer search experience.
Hillcrest Labs offers a pretty interesting interface available through their set top box. The consumer accesses the well-designed content interfaces and search screens with a slickly designed three-dimensional mouse device that allows the user to easily point and click on content or application choices.
Hitachi is focused on making the search experience as fast as possible with massive amounts of data. They’ve developed a very fast database and retrieval system, and are planning to bring it to the home set top box in partnership with cable companies and set top box manufacturers.
Currently the database is being used in in-dash, personal navigation and GPS devices with some really interesting application ideas. One application in particular allows the user to recall songs from the database that were playing at another time based upon GPS location information.
The main takeaway from the event was that there are many companies looking to make the digital living room a reality. So look out for a number of new services being offered by the cable operators, new set top boxes from companies you’ve never heard of, new content offerings and a multitude of business models in the coming months and years.
The bottom line, though, is it will take a lot of collaboration to make this vision a reality for all involved anytime soon.
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One Response to “The Digital Living Room Is Coming Soon…?”
By chitragupta on Apr 20, 2008 | Reply
That sounds good since consumers expect excitement and attention grabbing content and more likely to consume content on real-time, There are tremendous scope for interactive advertisement especially if it is crafted well using the latest technology.
It will work extendedly well across the channels and connect you to high profile audience those mostly hang out over entertainment-oriented sites. The interactive advertisement can influence both the retail environment and in an advertising context.