For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment
“The
Gadget Show Live”, scheduled for Apr. 10-14 in Birmingham, is a spin-off from
Channel Five’s primetime TV technology programme. In 2011 (pictured), the event
attracted more than 100,000 visitors: tickets for most days this year have sold
out. Event Marketing Manager Sally Bent says that our passion for gadgetry is
on the increase, “The standard of must-have technology is increasing all the
time, as is the number of exciting products on offer.”
The
origins of the word gadget are unclear although it might come from the French
“gachette”, commonly used to mean the trigger of a gun. In the 19th century,
British sailors used the term for any “mechanical contrivance” that helped them
in their daily work and it is much the same today, albeit the modern
contrivance is more often digital than mechanical.
The
Birmingham NEC show will spotlight “The Top 20 gadgets that we can’t live
without,” including the 55-inch OLED (organic light emitting diode) TV from LG,
which made its debut at CES in Las Vegas at the start of the year. Samsung’s
Galaxy S2 smartphone, chosen as Phone of the Year at the Mobile World Congress
in Barcelona, also will be on display. The thinnest and lightest so far from
the company, it offers such must-have phone features as voice control, face
recognition and an 8-megapixel camera.
A survey
carried out by exhibition organisers shows why it is wise to locate the event
at the NEC. Research platform Explori.com polled 1,000 people on how much they
spend on gadgets and responses show that people in the Midlands spend more than
anywhere else in the UK with five of its cities in the Top 20 table followed by
the London region and Wales.
According
to the survey, Canterbury, Kent is Gadget City with an average of £1,916 per
person handed over each year to acquire anything from a Sony SmartWatch to a
B&W Mini Theatre system. The cities of Bath (£1,586) in second place and
Stoke-on-Trent ((£1,480) also exhibit an above-average gadget habit as do the
residents of Exeter (£1,326), Edinburgh (£1,253) and Liverpool (£1,201). The
median annual UK spend on gadgets per person is £994.
In the
200 years that the word has been around, gadgets have become ubiquitous. As
their use has grown, however, so has the assumption that gadgets offer only
short-term solutions. A gadget does the job until a more permanent device comes
along: one step above a toy but not something you would pass on to your
grandchildren.
If it’s
true that people spend around £1,000 a year on these devices,, thatcould be
viewed as £1,000 less to spend on entertainment content. As homes, cars and
phones become part of the connected “internet of things”, we are surrounded by
many different gadgets that serve substantially the same purpose. It is in the
interests of the video home entertainment industry to intercept a proportion of
the spend on shiny new gadgets and direct it towards the acquisition of content
whether streamed over the cloud or moulded into plastic. The latest iPad screen
is unlikely to bettered for some years to come: it should be filled with video
entertainment.
In an
informed commentary published in March, market research company Parks
Associates Director Tom Kerber says “All devices will eventually be connected
to the internet. Each hardware object in the real world will have an
accompanying virtual object in the cloud, which represents the current state of
the end device and retains its operational history.”
He
reports that the much-heralded “smart refrigerator” is now available from at
least two Korean manufacturers. “Samsung includes an LCD touch screen on its
connected refrigerator that allows family members to leave a note, check the
weather, pull up recipes, and even listen to music,” says Kerber. It is but a
short step to add video from the cloud, perhaps SPHE’s “Julie and Julia”,
streamed from Lovefilm and watched while reheating the frozen food.
Bill
Gates (and others) said that we overestimate the change that will occur in the
next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. The
dramatic leap forward represented by the iPhone or iPad does not happen every
year and between these highlights there is the incremental improvement that
allows Apple to continue to sell last year’s iPad model at a slightly lower
price. Consolidation and interconnection are the most likely drivers over the
next two years rather than market-changing innovation.
At the
time that mobile phones first became commonplace, many people also carried
pocket calculators, portable music players, pocket cameras and other handy
gadgets. None of them were interconnected. All of this functionality and more
now resides on a small wafer of silicon connected to a touch screen of
increased size and sophistication. As Kerber points out, the latest gadgets use
the cloud to achieve interoperability while once-incompatible entertainment
devices link to each other through DLNA.
Turn on
the latest generation of Smart TVs and Blu-ray Disc players from Samsung and
the only thing the consumer needs to know is the password to the WiFi network.
Once entered, it is informative to watch the devices talk to each other as they
locate the smartphones, computers and energy monitors that are part of the Home
Area Network (HAN), regardless of the brand of the gadgets. Within a short
space of time, BD Live is enabled, apps appear and viewers can access all the
shared entertainment content within the home.
Online
services from Lovefilm, Netflix, BBC iPlayer and others appear alongside
broadcast digital radio and TV services, weather forecasts and travel news.
There is no longer a need for a dedicated gadget in every room: as long as
there is sufficient shared bandwidth, everyone in the household is now part of
the connected home.
Kerber
divides the advent of converged technologies into three groups. The first,
which includes wireless networking and reliable broadband connectivity, is
already here. The second is to open up of the market to new products and
services once market incumbents (primarily the telecom operators) switch to
open standards as the result of regulatory or competitive pressures. A third
group, still in embryo, enables the implementation of “personal assistant”
devices that learn from their environment and adjust their behaviour
accordingly.
Kerber
says, “In Japan, there are billboards that change the messages being displayed,
based on automatic content recognition. Real-time video classifies the
passers-by and the advertising changes to match the demographic.”
The
smartphones that we know today might appear quite dumb 10 years from now but
when they push all the heavy-duty processing up into the cloud they can appear
smart without much modification as long as the screens and the batteries last.
Tasks such as translation of the spoken word might be beyond the current
generation of hand-held devices but as Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt
has demonstrated on several occasions, the power of the processor in the gadget
is less important than the power available in the cloud.
“The
Apprentice” returned to BBC1 this month and Alan Sugar’s task for the teams in
Week 2 was to create a household gadget that we could not live without and then
market their invention to two sceptical retailers, home ware specialist
Lakeland and Amazon, the online vendor of every imaginable gadget.
As
inventor of that epitome of the dedicated digital gadget, the e-m@iler
telephone and keyboard combination, Sugar was well qualified to judge the
commercial potential of the gadgets devised by his budding apprentices. Neither
the bath-time plastic splash screen nor the tabletop composter impressed the
potential investor.
Amazon
buyers declined the opportunity to obtain the best price on offer by placing an
order for one million units of the plastic splash screen at £9.01 each.
Perhaps
the hopefuls should first have done a little market research down in Kent among
the shoppers in Gadget City.
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