In 10 Years, 99 Percent of Devices Will Be Connected, CEA’s DuBravac Says at CEA Industry Summit
SAN DIEGO -- Spectrum constraints, connectivity beyond traditional consumer electronics devices, the cloud, emerging input interfaces and battery life were among the topics in the Five Technologies to Watch session that opened the CEA Industry Forum Monday. Jason Oxman, CEA senior vice president-industry affairs, spoke of the “looming spectrum crisis” due to consumer demand for wireless broadcast services and reiterated CEA’s position that there needs to be more spectrum allocated for wireless consumer devices. “We're not quite at a crisis point,” said Roger Cheng, senior writer for CNET, “but we're heading toward a spectrum crunch,” he said, citing consumers’ increased usage as they use wireless devices for listening to music, watching movies and playing games.
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According to CEA figures, 171 million connected devices sold last year, and all of them “leveraged some type of spectrum,” said Shawn DuBravac, director of research for CEA. He said consumers increasingly want to be able to connect their devices for movies, email and other content “regardless of where they are or what device they're on” both inside and outside the home. Ten years from now, “we're going to look back at that number and say look how small that was,” he said. By then 99 percent of devices will connect to other devices and information pools, DuBravac said.
While today connected electronics encompass traditional CE products -- Blu-ray players, TVs, game players, smartphones and tablets -- wireless connectivity will expand outside of the traditional CE space, Oxman said. Cheng said dog collars and pill bottles are “already getting connected.” The impetus is on carriers to allocate resources to get CE makers and small “mom and pop developers” to create those types of next-gen devices, he said.
At CES 2012, wireless health, tablets and more connected devices will be in the spotlight, panelists said. DuBravac mentioned connected heart sensors and cars that can check status of engine and schedule an update to maintenance “by itself.” The cloud is behind much of the emerging connectivity, DuBravac said, as consumers are becoming more comfortable with the technology. Consumers have wanted to be able to access their content across devices, which used to be done on a device-to-device basis. Now, he said, it’s being done via the cloud where consumers upload information to the cloud and bring it back down. As a result, “we talk a lot about download speed, but it’s much more meaningful to talk about upload speed and how fast we can move content up into the cloud and then pull it back down,” he said. He referred to connected cameras as an example where upload speed is important.
The emergence of digital lockers is the next transition in CE, following the shift from analog to digital technology, DuBravac said. “The next evolution is managing those digital assets so you don’t have multiple copies of the same digital asset,” he said. That’s the goal of services including iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud and Dropbox, and cloud-based storage could change the way consumers shop for phones and other hardware, Oxman said. Having increasing amounts of memory on a phone won’t be as important when content is stored in the cloud, he said.
Within a year, consumers will have a higher comfort level with cloud technology, but the infrastructure currently isn’t in place to support cloud-based interaction, Cheng said. Cloud-based services are great in principle, but are not yet available on a widespread basis to be able to support consumer needs wherever they are, he said. Wireless networks “aren’t mature enough” yet to be able to handle all that consumers want to do in the cloud, he said.