‘Battle Royale’ Looms Among 'Big Players' in Voice Ecosystem, Says Futuresource

Consumer convenience will be voice integration’s main market driver because “it’s clearly hands- and eyes-free,” Carroll said. That can reduce the need for touch screens on some devices, “thereby reducing” bill of materials costs, she said, suggesting the rapid mainstreaming of voice-integrated products at affordable price points. “The big underlying trend that we picked up at the show is really around the voice ecosystem.”

How that ecosystem shakes out “will revolutionize how we search and discover information and entertainment, and also order goods and services,” Carroll said. “And this really is where the battle royale is now building among the big players.” Though “widespread support” for Amazon Alexa was announced at CES, “Google clearly is making headway, gaining support from OEMs,” she said. But Apple, never one to exhibit at CES, is “the elephant in the room,” she said. Announcements are expected this year from Apple, which “really can’t avoid entering this very dynamic aspect of the CE space,” she said.

TV continued to be “the flagship CE item” at many CES booths, said Jack Wetherill, Futuresource senior market analyst, calling innovation in the TV category another big show theme. “We expected to see big announcements from many of the main brands,” such as LG, Samsung and Sony, and “they didn’t disappoint us,” he said. “There were fresh ideas to show there’s still room to innovate in the TV space.”

Wetherill is very high on OLED, saying it’s “generally believed to be the best TV display technology.” At CES, he was pleased to see OLED take “further steps into the limelight,” he said. “Sony chose CES 2017 to reveal its OLED ambitions,” with yet-to-be-priced sets in the 55-, 65- and 77-inch classes, while LG’s “wallpaper” OLED TV “was one of the most admired and talked about products” shown at CES, he said. Futuresource sees global OLED TV shipments more than doubling in 2017 to 2 million units from an estimated 900,000 in 2016, Wetherill said.

Though 8K TV prototypes have been shown for years at past trade events, CES was the first at which some exhibitors gave actual “release dates,” including plans at Hisense to market 8K products in China in 2017, Wetherill said. But Futuresource “still believes that 8K will remain in the niche premium product family in China and Japan in the buildup to the 2020 Olympics” in Tokyo, he said.

At Futuresource, “we’re keeping an eye on 8K,” said Wetherill. But the firm doesn’t expect “these sets to make an impact in the North American or West European markets in the foreseeable future," he said. That's "unless 8K is tied in with some other compelling new technology,” such as how 4K has been bundled with high dynamic range, he said.

In autonomous vehicles, CES made clear how rapidly technology and commercialization timelines have advanced just in the past year, said Simon Bryant, Futuresource associate director. The "potential" for autonomous driving to change the "in-car experience" is "really fantastic, and pretty exciting," he said. "We're just seeing so much innovation in this space." The "race" to develop autonomous vehicles and infrastructure in major cities is "very, very intense," he said.

Futuresource now sees the first autonomous vehicles hitting the roads in 2019 or 2020, "which has jumped almost four or five years from what a lot of companies were saying last year," Bryant said. Nevertheless, "huge uncertainties" await the commercialization of self-driving cars, which will require "huge computing power" and "huge cost integration," and will need to overcome regulatory hurdles, he said. Futuresource is standing by its forecasts that 10 percent of the cars on the road will be autonomous by 2030, "and rising very quickly after that," he said.