What does the phrase “connected home” mean to you? Or “digital home” or wired “home” for that matter? If any of those have any resonance with you it’s likely to involve a fridge that orders the milk, a microwave that browses the web, or even a toaster that tells you the weather forecast (and no, I didn’t make that last one up!).
Having just returned from 2 days at the Connected Home conference, my head is not so much filled with outrageous technology as with a sense of frustration. And it’s a frustration which the whole connected home industry appears to share.
After the excesses of the dot com boom those involved with creating useful connected home products have been quietly getting on with it. There is an acceptance that products need to focus on one of the three key areas, areas that consumer surveys keep highlighting as being important in any connected home. They are communications, entertainment and security. So we have seen the roll out of broadband Internet, the launch of Windows XP Media Centre, the arrival of “wireless media adaptors” that let you connect your HiFi to the MP3 music files on your PC, and DIY stores selling web based home monitoring kits. Not a smoking toaster or supermarket shopping fridge in site.
So why am I, and the industry, frustrated? In a word “sales”. In two words – “take-up”.
The most remarkable thing about all this technology is how cheap it is. A few years ago if you wanted to deploy a “smart home” multi-room audio solution to enable you to listen to Celine Dion in every room in the house it would have cost you somewhere in the region of £10,000. Today you can do it for about £100 a room. Web based home security starts at around £200. Wireless broadband through out the house just £100 again. All of a sudden this stuff is affordable.
So why aren’t many people buying it yet?
The first problem is that no-one knows quite how to categorise all this equipment. Is it Hi-Fi to buy at Dixons or a home accessory to buy at Rackams? Is it a bit of DIY from B&Q or a computer to buy at PC World? Even supposedly savvy on-line retailers have trouble pigeonholing this stuff - on one site I found my Wi-Fi Hi-Fi unit filed amongst the radio antennas!. So even if consumers actually know what they are after – and what it’s called – they will struggle to actually find it on the shelves, and struggle even harder to find a sales assistant who can explain it all to them. Consumers have expressed a desire to have this sort of technology – but retailers and manufacturers are struggling to show and explain how this technology fills that need.
Once you get it home you also soon realize why it’s not yet in the mass market. My Wi-Fi network took a good evening to set up. Likewise my Hi-Fi to PC audio connection (over Wi-Fi of course). It can also now take me 5 minutes to set the system up every time I want to listen to a piece of music! One of the key messages from the conference (and in fact one which I’d already heard from my wife – which should have saved me the conference fee!) was that consumers do not expect all this new technology to make things which were easy (choosing a CD from a CD rack) suddenly hard (having to configure IP addresses, WiFi SSIDs and music servers). Bear in mind though that much of this technology is literally months old – I’m sure even the first Mercedes Benz had a few problems in its first months.
The final issues are back to the name thing – and that is linked to the market. Is this technology to help house-builder sell houses (but hey appear to be able to sell more homes than they can make at the moment)?. Is it a way for telephone companies to increase the magical “annual revenue per user”? Or is it a way for Mr & Mrs Average to record and watch the TV programmes they want to watch, whilst booking that city-break over the web from the sofa, and checking that granny’s OK over a remote home-care link.
What is certain is that the technology does exist now to do all this, and to do it at a price the consumer can afford. The challenge, as ever, is to make it reliable, integrate the various components so that it works pretty seamlessly, and then be able to express the value of the systems in a way which retailers, builders and customers can understand – and a key to that is developing a single, common language.
Meanwhile I’ll go back to reconfiguring my WiFi HiFi everyday, but take some heart from the fact that my eight year-old already has it totally sussed, and considers any technology that let’s her listen to Skater Boy anywhere in the house well worth whatever money daddy paid for it!
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