Smart TV, Smart Homes Take Top Billing At
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CES COVERAGE Smart TV, Smart Homes Take Top Billing at CES At the annual extravaganza known as the International CES, vendors introduced many new bandwidth-gobbling devices and services. These will present opportunities for providers that can offer robust broadband. A BBC Staff Report he biggest, baddest trade show of them all – the Inter- national Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas Teach January – was bigger and badder than ever this year. The 2012 International CES drew a record 153,000 attendees, including 34,000 from overseas. More than 3,100 exhibitors, occupying 1.9 million square feet of exhibit space, introduced APRIL 24 – 26 • INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL – DALLAS an astonishing 20,000 new products. As usual, the show offered a foretaste of what will drive New consumer electronics devices consumer bandwidth demand: more indispensable gadgets, are affecting bandwidth demand in more video content, more high-resolution formats, more (and MDU housing. Find out more at the easier) connectivity and more services moving to the cloud. For broadband service providers, two noteworthy trends Broadband Communities Summit. were over-the-top video – especially delivered to TV sets – and home monitoring and control. Over-the-top video has been proprietary hardware. Digital photo frames, though they can gathering steam (and making broadband providers anxious) still be purchased in any Walmart or Best Buy store, failed to for several years, but the home monitoring market is just be- generate excitement at this year’s CES; this category may soon ginning to take off. be superseded by tablet computers. Google TV has been slow to catch on despite Google’s ef- fort to assemble an ecosystem of device makers, service provid- More gadgets, more video content, ers and application developers. Users don’t find the interface particularly inviting; more important, Google failed to line up more high-resolution formats, more enough content. At present, the software is available on only a few television models. However, as analyst Colin Dixon of The connectivity, more cloud services. Diffusion Group points out, because Google is “the only com- pany at the table with an ostensibly open platform,” Google TV could eventually become as prevalent in the TV world as FirsT, a Grain oF salT Android is in the mobile world. (Dixon doesn’t expect that to Not all the consumer electronics products and services intro- happen any time soon.) duced with great fanfare in earlier years have met expecta- In any case, Google TV should probably be seen as part of tions. That’s no surprise, given the continued weak economy a long-term strategy that includes the makeover of YouTube and other challenges. Cisco discontinued the Flip camcorder from a destination for cat videos to a home for mainstream but last year – who needs a Flip when filming videos on a smart- independently produced long-form content – in other words, phone and uploading them to Facebook is so easy? (However, the TV of tomorrow. Other aspects of the strategy involve Toshiba introduced three Flip-like devices at this year’s CES, building a gigabit network in the two Kansas Cities to test the so Cisco may not have had the final word on this subject.) TV of tomorrow and, perhaps, offering a pay-TV service over Cisco also discontinued the Umi personal telepresence system, the KC networks. which most observers thought vastly overpriced. Sezmi, which 3DTV has also been slow out of the gate. A Parks Asso- offered an over-the-top video service, exited the business and ciates survey of broadband households conducted just before sold its patents – again, a case of consumers’ rejecting expensive the 2011 holiday shopping season found 3DTV ownership and 44 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com | January/February 2012 CES COVERAGE interest in the mid-single digits. Broad- Kurt Scherf, vice president and prin- casts in 3D continue; ESPN, despite cipal analyst at Parks Associates, calls the rumors that it would drop 3D, actually Roku Streaming Stick “a game changer broadcast a boxing match in 3D from for the smart TV market,” adding, “It CES. However, the scarcity of content takes the leading streaming platform and viewers’ disappointment with the and integrates into the TV in a way that experience have kept 3D from becom- no one has been able to do before.” ing a force to reckon with – so far. Televisions themselves are becoming The size of a USB flash drive, the Roku Stream- more versatile. For example, Samsung’s Connected Video ing Stick plugs into a TV and delivers stream- smart TVs feature built-in HD cameras Despite some failures, online video re- ing online video. and microphones, which enable voice mains the dominant theme of consumer and gestural controls as well as Skyping. electronics. Analyst firm NPD In-Stat the emerging over-the-top approaches.” The TVs offer more than 1,400 apps, and expects the number of connected devices NPD In-Stat forecasts that more than installed to grow from 257 million units the number of third-party developers has 23 million hybrid STBs will ship in grown to 25,000. New family-oriented in 2011 to 1.34 billion units in 2016. North America in 2012. Mobile devices such as smartphones services include photo sharing, syncing Roku, the manufacturer of a popu- of fitness goals and activities, and inte- and tablets – which are multipurpose lar dedicated video player, introduced a but are particularly well suited to video – gration of educational programming new device that promises to make its old with educational progress monitoring. have been wildly successful, and CES device obsolete: the Streaming Stick, a featured plenty of them this year. A new Like Roku, Samsung appears to have Wi-Fi-enabled device about the size of a mobile device category called the ultra- cracked a tough problem that limits USB flash drive that plugs directly into book made its debut. Ultrabooks, based adoption of smart TVs – their tendency a TV to deliver streaming video. The on Intel Sandy Bridge processors, are to become quickly outdated in a fast- stick, which can be controlled by a TV lightweight, powerful laptops that share changing world. Samsung’s new Evolu- remote, will not require cables or a sepa- many of tablet computers’ advantages. tion Kit lets owners upgrade their TVs’ Some even have touchscreens. rate power source. Like Roku players, it “smarts” on a regular basis without hav- Other successful categories include will deliver more than 400 channels and ing to invest in new televisions. connected Blu-ray Disc players, hybrid will receive free software updates and set-top boxes, set-top boxes dedicated to channel enhancements. sharinG ConTenT OTT video and connected (aka smart) Of course, the stick can be attached Across deViCes TVs. Smart TVs, which were shown only to televisions that have the neces- Another boost to online video may come by every major manufacturer at CES, sary receptacle, but Roku designed the from the UltraViolet standard. In an ef- have proven popular with consum- device using MHL, a new standard that fort to discourage users from illegally ers. The same Parks Associates survey makes use of HDMI connectors on TVs burning DVDs, the industry has strug- that showed little demand for 3DTVs and that has been adopted by nearly 100 gled to provide a legal, authenticated showed much higher ownership of, and vendors. Best Buy’s house brand, Insig- method for consumers to store pur- interest in, connected TVs. According nia, plans to bring out stick -compatible chased video content in online “lockers” to numerous surveys, the great majority TVs later this year. and view it from multiple devices. of people who buy connected TVs use them to watch online video in addition to standard video services. For those who aren’t ready to replace their television sets, hybrid set-top boxes remain a less expensive solution. “The next logical iteration is for the set-top box to enhance and expand traditional TV-related services by permitting access to content from the Internet or from Internet-like Web services that provide a ‘walled garden’ of authorized content,” says Gerry Kaufhold, research director of NPD In-Stat. “By combining tradi- tional TV services with ‘enhancements’ that come in via broadband, content owners and service providers think they can successfully compete with all Samsung’s user interface for its smart-TV products features a variety of popular services and content. January/February 2012 | www.broadbandcommunities.com | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | 45 CES COVERAGE CES insiGhTs From Parks assoCiaTes Video serViCes, Pay TV, and oTT Broadband households in north america and Consumer viewership of online video dramatically europe own an average of 5.4 and 4.8 connectable increased in the past few years, and this trend will devices respectively. continue in 2012. • By 2016, ownership of these devices will almost dou- • Nearly 70 percent of U.S. broadband households ble to 9.8 in North America and 9 in Europe. viewed online video on their PCs at least monthly in • Increasing adoption of connected platforms capable 2011, compared with 38 percent in 2006. of accessing this content online will fuel growth in • Netflix recently announced that its members around digital media distribution in 2012. These devices in- the world viewed more than 2 billion hours of con- clude desktop computers, smart TVs, Blu-ray Disc tent in Q4 2011 alone. players, game consoles, laptops, netbooks, tablets • Consumers acquired an increasing number of plat- and smartphones. forms they can use to watch digital video. Through- • Each device category is at a different stage of matu- out 2012, households will consume more and rity, and penetration will follow a different growth more video on mobile devices such as tablets and rate.