Connecting the home the IoT way

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WhaTech Channel: IPTV News

Published: 13 March 2017

Submitted by Aspen Lite

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The Internet of Things (IoT) has been stealing technology tradeshow headlines this year from CES to Mobile World Congress. The top line take-away is that IoT is now permeating every aspect of the digital spectrum and every player from device maker to bandwidth provider needs to be armed.

At CES this year, there was a parade of new IoT devices, spanning from connected cars to personal wearables. While Amazon’s virtual assistant technology, Alexa, is emerging as an operating system for connected consumer devices.

Over in Barcelona at the Mobile World Congress the IoT was nominated as the biggest business opportunity of 2017 by nearly half of visitors and exhibitors surveyed by the GSMA (48.2%), followed by mobile payments (14.5%) and artificial intelligence (14%).

In terms of IoT opportunities, the survey highlighted the “opportunity for mobile operators to play a greater role in the IoT value chain than simply providing the connectivity”.

The significant factor for IoT is that it is being integrated into all facets of the digital ecosystem including IPTV. IoT is driving the reinvention of consumer technologies. Connected products are taking on new form factors and providing new use cases, content providers are leveraging greater bandwidth to enable new content experiences.

According to Parks Associates’ latest research, in 2016 U.S. broadband households own an average of 8.1 connected computing, entertainment, or mobile devices, plus another 2.1 connected home devices. More than one-third of consumers own a connected health device, and over 63 million broadband households subscribe to an OTT video service.

The IoT industries have overcome several hurdles to reach this point.  One key area is the setup and out-of-the-box experience has simplified for individual devices. For smart home devices, as adoption has increased, the number of owners reporting technical problems with their devices, from setup to ongoing operation, has declined, indicating the user experience with these products is improving

New companies are evolving to meet these challenges, emerging company NXP unveiled a new range of ARM processors at CES designed to bring functions like streaming media, voice recognition and networked audio to IoT endpoints. This is capable of supporting 4K UltraHD and HDR video streams plus up to 20 channels of SDS512 audio.

These merging of solutions will have a galvanising effect on the industry. According to AccuStream Research, the digital video value chain industry grew by 28.7% last year to bring in more than US$68 billion in revenue. This covers everything from IPTV and advertising technology platforms to advanced media processing and content delivery networks.

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