Another year has flown by – and in the residential custom electronics market time seems to fly by at gigahertz speeds! If you don’t attend at least one of the major electronics trade shows each year you feel like you are quickly out of touch with new residential technology solutions. So to help prepare you for next year’s technology developments I’ve prepared my top 5 predictions list for 2010. Keep in mind these are only my predictions based on the trends that I have seen in this market over the past decade – so measure each one against your own experiences to decide how you want them to guide your own technology purchase decisions. Without further ado, here goes:
Prediction #1:
Apple will continue to extend its technical prowess throughout the home. Riding on the enormous success of its iPOD music player and the iPhone – expect to see Apple’s genius for user-friendly interfaces to spread into touch screen tablets, flat screen televisions and whole house music systems. As Apple moves from mobile and single room solutions to whole house distributed entertainment solutions they will increasingly serve the mass market with these products. The net effect will be that even a greater percentage of the US residential market will become aware of whole house digital entertainment solutions and many will be seeking custom electronic integrators help to deliver on the promise of these offerings.
Prediction #2:
More affordable, high performance, in-wall touch-screen controls will become readily available. Over the past decade or so, these touch-screens have been primarily used in high end, high budget whole house control offerings. Control 4 changed that market a couple of years ago with their introduction of their sub $700 in-wall touch-screen control interfaces and I expect that this sub $1,000 touch-screen control trend to continue with higher resolution and larger screens from a number of major electronics manufacturers over the next 12 months. With increased processing power and higher resolutions these touch-screens will have very rich end-user interfaces that are much more affordable for our clients in the months and years ahead.
Prediction #3:
Home servers will be an integral part of most of our total home integration offerings. HP has just started shipping their home server line of computers and it is inevitable that the home will have a server. Inevitable because our clients are asking us for more services than just email, print and Internet access. They want a photo server so they can view photos everywhere in the home, they want a music server so they can listen to their recorded music everywhere in the home, and they want a storage server so their data will be backed up reliably and predictably from all of the home’s computers and laptops. Last but not least, they want a server from which they can easily access their home’s content when they are traveling on the road. Products like HP’s home server are just the beginning of this trend towards computing based home serving products. This is another very positive trend for the custom electronics industry because most of these will require professional installation for clients to get the greatest value from these solutions.
Prediction #4:
We will move from switching analogue signals to switching digital signals around the home. RS232 based component analogue switches will yield to RS232 based HDMI switches and ultimately to gigabit data packet switches. The primary hurdle to this movement is digital rights management – we simply can’t get all of our high definition content legally recorded on hard drives that are connected to the home network and the Internet. Once that hurdle is overcome (and we are beginning to see some positive strides in that direction – TiVO To Go now works for their HD Series 3 TiVOs and CableCARDS allow high definition recording in the Microsoft Vista/Extender architecture) then expect that all high definition audio/video content will reside in a server (not unlike the one described in prediction #3 except it will have terabytes and terabytes of storage). This high definition personal video recorder home server will send its content across the gigabit switched network to TVs, computers, laptops, and other mobile electronic platforms throughout the home.
Prediction #5:
Televisions will get smarter. Samsung and Pioneer are already shipping flat screen televisions with Ethernet ports to easily gain access to the home’s audio and video content without requiring a separate set-top box decoder to be locally installed in the room with the flat screen TV. As more and more clients prefer the clean look of just a flat-screen TV on the wall without the plethora of high tech boxes surrounding this monitor these all-in-one data decoder/TV solutions will gain greater and greater appeal. This architecture plays right into our expertise since it requires the design, installation, and control of a centralized media server distributing content to in-wall integrated display screens throughout the home.
Those are my 5 predictions for 2010 – what are yours?
(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)
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