Vecta on Connected Homes

Vecta Consulting

Vecta on Connected Homes

The "Connected Home" is at a very early stage of adoption and, with multiple convergence possibilities, many vested interests on which wins.

Convergence is - arguably - the most powerful source of innovation; spawning new ways to deliver entertainment, information and education to wherever, whenever and however we want to receive it.

In practice, the consumer is likely to prefer - and hence adopt more quickly - approaches which build on the most frequently owned and valued devices in the home.

We tend to consume content socially on a big living room screen or more personally on a smaller TV screen, MP3 player or tablet
We tend to interact on a personal handset, whether by voice or text and increasingly photo and video
We tend to create more substantial content on a connected PC

Less frequently used devices, whether for energy, health or security will be taken up more readily and cost-effectively if they align with these adoption paths.

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To most of us, "connected home" refers to a soft, albeit extended, version of the multi-socket panel behind our TV screens; the viewer can choose an audio-visual or data source and then interact with the screened content.

The essence of a connected home is to allow multiple sources of content to be accessed over various networks from a variety of screens.

The content can come from:

a Set Top Box, bringing multi-channel broadcast audio and/or video over cable, satellite, terrestrial and, possibly "over the top" content via broadband
a Media Server, bringing multi-media music, photos or video
a Connected PC bringing locally-hosted or cloud-based computing, communications or media services sourced locally or via broadband
more specialised devices for energy monitoring, security, telecare, telehealth, etc

Homes have multiple screens, mostly TV and/or PC but increasingly SmartPhones and Tablet Computers; more of these are likely to be able to acccess more content sources.

The key challenge is the interconnection:

WiFi appears simplest but all the but the smallest open-plan designs will suffer from reception blackspots in which only limited performance is possible
Cat6 cabled Ethernet has the capability but is expensive and disruptive to install in an exisitng home.
Fibre-optic Ethernet also has the capability and can be more readily installed but is more costl

Integrated "Home Hub" broadband and wifi routers will readily support suitable telehealth devices and/or small numbers of connected TV, PC, tablets or SmartPhones in smaller homes.

larger homes will require a fibre-optic or Cat6 wired backbone linking key parts of the home with a number of small-area WiFi zones.

Decades of Ethernet TCP/IP experience has created messaging protocols that allow on-screen apps to interact with data and content over such networks. This then is the single environment, albeit with some simple physical variants, around which connected homes can be built.

The next five years will be interesting as platforms from Apple, FaceBook, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony vie with more traditional consumer electronic approaches to create a new era of personal entertainment, information and education with the PC, increasingly in mobile tablet form, remaining at the centre. Critical to success has been the emergence of low-cost integrated broadband / wifi hubs.

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More info from: Frank.Morris@vecta5.com

Vecta Consulting Limited, Mulberry House, 2 The Spinney,
Cottenham, CAMBRIDGE, CB24 8RN
Tel: +44 (0) 1954 250222, Fax: +44 (0) 1954 252333

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