That's (Smart) Entertainment, Part 1: Services

That Old Thing?

Home entertainment is arguably the first category of consumer electronics to truly go 'smart' in the smart home sense.  People have been trying to automate the couch viewing experience for decades now with mixed results.  Companies like Crestron, Control4 and Kaleidescape have been working on signal distribution, control for as along as the content has become digital.  And while those companies and many more have done some incredible things, the world has changed in a few fundamental ways that have forced them, the component (TV, receiver) manufactures and the distribution companies themselves to re-evaluate the concept of 'Home Entertainment.'

These disruptions are not only the wide adoption of smart phones and tablets that have moved where content is watched from the living room to the hand, or even the rise of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu.  From a make-my-home-entertainment-smart perspective, the rise of home WiFi, specifically the 802.11g and n standards, have been the real disruption.  Now there is no longer a need to run cable (ethernet or something more specialized) to automate your TV and receiver with the rest of your home.  Netflix and Chill can happen with the press of a button that runs on batteries and is not physically wired to anything.

Who Do You Think We Are?

None of this should be news to you if you're reading this blog.  I flatter myself that my audience is aware of the latest and greatest in technology and the resulting trends.  Having said that, I'm going to hazard a guess that most of you are not officially "Cord Cutters:" you have not removed all TV services from your monthly bill and now watch content exclusively via streaming services.  The reason that you haven't (again, guessing here) is that either you watch sports and there is not a good service for live sports yet, or that your internet provider is bundling their TV services with the internet for less than you would pay for the comparable internet service alone.  There's no shame here; do what you've got to do, but keep in mind that the trend is a move away from "How do I get TV?" towards "How do I access specific content?"

On To the Point

The preceding three paragraphs are all just intro.  Stage setting.  What I really want to discuss is how all of this is applicable to the world of the Internet of Things.  I'm going to handle this in two stages: this week, how have streaming services changed our expectations of a smart home and then, next week, what devices have truly made our home entertainment smart.

From a streaming services perspective, the services that have impacted the smart home the most are not the video streaming services like Netflix, but the music ones: Spotify, Apple Music and, initially, Pandora.

Prior to these streaming music services, getting music from your collection (CDs, really) meant having equipment that could house the entire collection, connecting that to multi-zone amplifiers and then running speaker wire to each location in the home.  Then along came the iPhone and Pandora and Bluetooth and, only slightly later, Sonos.  Now, instead of running speaker wire everywhere and trying to figure out how to hide the wires, you plugged a powered speaker into an electrical outlet and that was installation handled.  No multi-zone amps.  No keypads to install as it is all done through the app.  In fact, everything could be done by the end user, no fuss, no muss.

It was this ease-of-install that has been the big disrupter 'smartening' the home entertainment category.  Not video streaming services.  Not 4K TVs (and certainly not 3D TVs).  It has been the ability to get your own personal elevator music through out your home.

Today, this has expanded beyond music to voice assistants, Chromecasts (both regular and audio) and the entire category of DIY smart homes.  Because of WiFi and the smart phone and streaming services, getting a large dedicated controller and rewiring your home is a thing of the past.

Next week, I'll get more specific on some of the hardware that makes today's home entertainment automation a simple(r), clean(er) world.