Why The Living Room Is So Important To Apple
2007-01-09
EETimes has another great article that shows in detail why the home market is so important to Apple. Entitled The Top Ten Hang-ups in Home Networking, it catalogs the problems of interoperability, multiple standards, DRM, customer confusion, and leadership void that makes connecting anything to anything difficult or impossible. But the opportunity is huge:
A few data points provide a snapshot of the opportunities. Market watcher iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) predicts shipments of products with integrated wired home networking will rise by more than a factor of 10 in the next four years, to hit 223.8 million units in 2010. Parks Associates estimates the number of North American homes with networked digital-video recorders more than tripled from 400,000 in 2005 to 1.7 million by the end of 2006.
They state the problem very clearly:
But there are no easy pickings in this gold rush. Engineers face historic levels of complexity building the digital home for several reasons. An unprecedented number of players are competing for a piece of the action. Coordination between these would-be architects is minimal.
and give the consequences:
"The glue that holds all this together is home networking, and it stinks," said Van Baker, a consumer analyst with Gartner Dataquest, in an early 2006 story. "If home networking stays like it is, it will stall at 30 percent penetration," he said.
The home network is wide open for any player that can simplify, market, and deliver. Whoever achieves significant penetration will either drag the other players along, or push them to the side. Clearly iTV is part of this, but I expect there to be more.
Apple will start with the TV, get a toehold, and place themselves in a position to enable other players to do business through them, so creating an ecosystem. Think low-price downloadable games, YouTube videos, iChat, networked security cameras, and things like that. Make it compatible and it will just work on any Apple home system.
A few data points provide a snapshot of the opportunities. Market watcher iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.) predicts shipments of products with integrated wired home networking will rise by more than a factor of 10 in the next four years, to hit 223.8 million units in 2010. Parks Associates estimates the number of North American homes with networked digital-video recorders more than tripled from 400,000 in 2005 to 1.7 million by the end of 2006.
They state the problem very clearly:
But there are no easy pickings in this gold rush. Engineers face historic levels of complexity building the digital home for several reasons. An unprecedented number of players are competing for a piece of the action. Coordination between these would-be architects is minimal.
and give the consequences:
"The glue that holds all this together is home networking, and it stinks," said Van Baker, a consumer analyst with Gartner Dataquest, in an early 2006 story. "If home networking stays like it is, it will stall at 30 percent penetration," he said.
The home network is wide open for any player that can simplify, market, and deliver. Whoever achieves significant penetration will either drag the other players along, or push them to the side. Clearly iTV is part of this, but I expect there to be more.
Apple will start with the TV, get a toehold, and place themselves in a position to enable other players to do business through them, so creating an ecosystem. Think low-price downloadable games, YouTube videos, iChat, networked security cameras, and things like that. Make it compatible and it will just work on any Apple home system.
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