The Digital Ecosystem

JANUARY 19, 2010
For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment

We enter 2010 with the prospect of rising Blu-ray sales and the launch of 3D to spice up the New Year, so it is worth reflecting on the changes in home entertainment that imminent advances in consumer electronics will bring.

It’s not just the onward march of broadband that will shape the year ahead; there has been a fundamental change in the black and silver boxes that once lined the shelves of Dixons. What we know and understand about audio-visual hardware is about to alter significantly as the legacy of one box per task finally gives way to multi-function devices.

The announcement week that Tesco has joined the cross-industry Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) shows that Tesco Category Director for Entertainment Rob Salter has grasped what’s ahead. The membership of DECE includes studios, distributors, retailers and other parties interested in ensuring that digital deliveries of entertainment content will work any time, any place and anywhere in what has inevitably been called the “Martini moment”.

Consumers have tired of buying the same title over and again for each new format, and DECE members – currently numbering 21 – have united to set a common standard for digital distribution. Disney, which at one time was thought to be going it alone with its Keychest digital rights management (DRM) initiative, has stressed that its proposals are completely compatible with those of DECE. Format wars have no place in the coming decade, so full marks to Tesco for encouraging other retailers to get on board.

Inevitably 3D captured most of the headlines at the Consumer Electronics Show 2010, which opened in Las Vegas, but the impact of stereoscopic content on packaged media sales is likely to be insignificant until 2011 and beyond. The fact that we now have an agreed Blu-ray 3D standard is welcome news but the most important announcements to come from the show are about hardware: after many years in which convergence was little more than a buzzword, technology has finally converged.

The audio-visual landscape was reassuringly simple for most of this century with little change from the final decade of the 20th. The television set dominated the living room, a dumb box that received a regular supply of content from broadcast programmes and packaged media. Into that was plugged a recorder, a player and a set-top box for watching subscription programmes from satellite TV. Broadband added a connected computer to the mix, usually in a different room and always restricted to web browsing and low-res streaming video.

It was easy to label the function of each element in the chain – the TV, the DVD player, the PVR and the Sky Box – without having to look under the hood and understand what was inside. Even though the public eagerly accepted the flat screen, for most of the 13 years since it was first shown at CES 1997, it remained a dumb TV set.

In the same way as “go-faster stripes” were a must-have motoring accessory that concealed the fact that your budget hot-hatch was little different from a standard saloon, external appearance has been the biggest differentiator for entertainment hardware for many years. Chrome, stainless steel and polished wood defined the product’s place in the market; designer flat screens costing thousands sometimes housed the same small number of standard components to be found in much cheaper devices.

After several false starts, computing, communication and entertainment are now to be found in a single box together with a wide screen and a wireless connection to the world outside. It began with the Apple iPhone, which combines all of the above along with GPS, in what we once referred to as a mobile phone. The Nexus One from Google adds a camera with more megapixels and an organic LED (OLED) screen to the mix to compete with the many other devices with similar innards launched at CES.

At the Sony presentation on the eve of the show, CEO Howard Stringer announced that later this year any PlayStation 3 will be able to play Blu-ray 3D content through a simple upgrade. What was once a games console is now positioned at the heart of entertainment in the home, streaming content from the PlayStation Network (PSN) and delivering full HD 1080p to the TV.

The TV set, too, is no longer the single-function box it once was. Every major CE manufacturer at CES including Samsung, LG, Toshiba and Sony, is offering internet-connected TVs that link directly to catch-up services such as iPlayer and Hulu, stream Video On Demand and support web browsing. They are 3D-ready as well, as viewers of BSkyB will discover when the Sky 3D service launches later this year.

Another indication that the TV is no longer “just a TV” comes from LG, Panasonic and internet phone company Skype. What was once a free phone service on your computer has become a “1080p video communication centre”, bringing life-sized images to the living room TV. Of course, if you own the 152-inch 3D HDTV screen from Panasonic that was announced at the show, the prospect of conversations with larger-than-life relatives may drive you back to your desktop PC.

Portable phone handsets now include advanced GPS features that are the equal of dedicated satnav units, which have to be removed from the car every time you park. What does the future hold for companies like TomTom when an iPhone or a Nexus One can offer as much in navigation and a lot more besides?

Since most of us spend a lot of time on the road, it is no surprise that Sony, Ford and Microsoft are planning to include the car in the converged environment. They came together for the keynote address at CES 2010 to present their view of the automobile of the near future.

Get ready for cars with interactive dashboards, full satellite navigation, in-built web browser and content downloading direct to the in-car entertainment system. Thankfully, the driver’s screen is disabled except when parked, so conversations with relatives on Skype are restricted to sound only. Ford claims that it is the first car company to have the equivalent of the Apple App store onboard, allowing drivers to tailor their vehicles to their needs.

Perhaps now is the time to take off those go-faster stripes and acknowledge that the future has arrived.