A new forecast from PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that entertainment and media companies will spend more on digital in the coming years to adapt to consumers’ growing preference for online and mobile platforms. Companies must embrace digital “not as a competitor…but as a complement.”

Consumer behavior is changing in three “themes,” the report argues. The first is the growth of Internet-connected mobile devices. As a result, consumers are coming to expect ubiquity — they want to access content anytime, anywhere. The report predicts over 96 million will have access to mobile Internet by 2014.

Next is the “growing dominance” of the Internet experience, as traditional media — TV, newspapers, music — are consumed online. In particular, people are using “streaming personalized music services such as Pandora in preference to buying physical CDs or even digital downloads.”

Finally, consumers will be increasingly ready to pay for online content, as long as they get convenient, flexible and unique content in exchange.

Three sectors of the digital entertainment ecosystem—device manufacturers and retailers, content producers, and service providers—have much different visions of the home entertainment future, reports In-Stat. Each industry sector will continue to try to mold the future to its advantage.

“In the TV and video ecosystem, operators and media companies want to avoid what happened in digital music, where Apple dominates the digital music ecosystem,” says Keith Nissen, In-Stat analyst. “As Web-to-TV initiatives accelerate, pay TV operators ‘TV Everywhere’ concepts must deliver more than just TV content on a PC screen. It must deliver a complimentary web-based video experience to any screen. Meanwhile, media companies must balance existing distribution channels with new ‘over-the-top’ opportunities”.

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

• Exclusive live sports and TV events are a key competitive advantage for Pay TV operators.
• Device manufacturers and retailers have bet heavily on the adoption of Blu-ray technology, which has been slow to take hold. 
• High value content will migrate to premium channels, benefiting Pay TV subscription revenue. 
• Video content on the Internet, or Over-the-Top Video (OTT) video services, will be a net positive for content producers that correctly navigate the rapidly changing distribution channels and business models. 
• The value of the home digital entertainment market in the US will total $233 billion by 2013.

 
The research, “Competing Business Models for the Future of Digital Entertainment”, covers the worldwide market for digital entertainment. It includes:

• Examination of the primary market visions of the three industry sectors, and evaluation of their drivers and barriers.
• Five-year forecasts covering digital content ownership, including video disc sales, EST, rentals and downloads.
• Five-year forecasts of home digital entertainment revenue, including CE devices, broadcast and online advertising, and service subscription revenue. 
• Consumer survey responses regarding consumer preferences for acquiring and managing digital content, including topics such as rental, purchase, download-to-own, advertising, rights lockers, price points, and churn.

With Grande Specchio, Parrot and Martin Szekely thought bigger in developing a photo frame equipped with a 10.4 inch high resolution LCD screen.
The control interface of the frame has been conceived to be both very intuitive and elegant. A trackball and almost unnoticeable tactile buttons make it easy to
surf in the menu and to select pictures.

The Grande Specchio also has a position sensor to automatically rotate the photos on landscape or portrait mode and an eco-sensor to automatically switch-off the frame when there is no more light indoor. A wall fixation is also provided.

With Grande Specchio, Parrot sticks to the original idea of Martin Szekely: a High Tech mirror connected to the internet.
The Grande Specchio

uses the Google Android™ operating system to connect to the web. To wander in the cyber world or to abandon oneself to the poetry of Internet,

Parrot developed two software: People and Holidays.

People, for a never-ending slide show of faces of the world. People randomly looks for portraits of unknown persons on the web. Men, women, children’ faces from all over the world, from all nations, instantly appear on the frame and disappear, endlessly…

Holidays, for a never-ending journey.
Once you have chosen a place on Google™ Maps, Holidays joins the closest beach and follow it up, flying over it like a bird. Moreover, Holidays searches pictures on
the Internet which have been taken from these beaches: sunsets, cliffs, kids’ games, coastal villages… As many invitations for a break…

Magnify your pictures
An open window on the cyber world The Grande Specchio is a bundle of networks protocols accessible via Wi-Fi to:
Be informed: web services platforms Windows Live™ FrameIt and FrameChannel ® are installed on the frame to receive information (weather forecast, economic or financial news, road traffic, sports scores…) via RSS feeds.
Exchange: a Pop3 and Imap e-mail client enables you to give an e-mail address to the frame in order to send it photos.
Share: you can share your photos with your online community via photo sharing websites (Picasa™, Flick’r®)
Transfer: Microsoft network client enables you to drag-and-drop photos from your PC or Mac® directly to the frame.

The Grande Specchio certainly offers the most comprehensive connectivity: USB, SD, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth have been harnessed at the most.
Its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections enable to transfer photos from almost any digital devices: PC, Mac® and mobile phone. The slots for SD card and USB port, gracefully concealed, enable to benefit from a large memory in the Grande Specchio. The USB connection also enables to pick up photos from your iPhone® easily.

• 36% of digital sets sold in 2013 will be network-enabled.
• DTV Revenue in Asia-Pacific will see a 6.3% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2008 to 2013, the fastest growth among the major regions, except for Rest-of-World. 
• DTVs are now the only TVs available in most of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. 
• Silicon TV tuners capable of demodulating both analog and digital television signals in a single chipset are beginning to replace Can TV tuners in high-end models.
  

Faced with heat from iTunes and other digital downloads, the nearly-three-decade-old music CD is slowly melting away.

iTunes-purchased songs now account for 25 percent of the overall music market--both physical and digital--in the U.S., says an NPD Group report released Tuesday. However, CDs are still the most popular format for music lovers, winning a 65 percent slice of the market for the first half of 2009.

Digital music downloads have jumped in recent years, said NPD, hitting 35 percent of the overall market for the first half of this year, compared with 30 percent last year and 20 percent in 2007.

For the first half of 2009, iTunes itself snagged a 69 percent share of the overall digital music arena, trailed far behind by Amazon.com with 8 percent.

"The growth of legal digital music downloads, and Apple's success in holding that market, has increased iTunes's overall strength in the retail music category," said Russ Crupnick, entertainment industry analyst for NPD Group.

The CD, though, marches on. Among CD retailers, Wal-Mart leads with a 20 percent chunk of the physical music market, said NPD. Best Buy took a 16 percent share, followed by Target and Amazon at 10 percent each. Still, the days of the CD seem numbered.
"Many people are surprised that the CD is still the dominant music delivery format, given the attention to digital music and the shrinking retail footprint for physical products," said Crupnick. "But with digital music sales growing at 15 to 20 percent, and CDs falling by an equal proportion, digital music sales will nearly equal CD sales by the end of 2010."

Source Cnet.news

Researchers have developed a prototype home capable of learning and adapting to its residents, but is it also capable of bringing in big bucks for service providers?

‘If these walls could talk’ is a common expression, but ‘if these walls could text, learn and respond to their resident’s queries’ is when things really get interesting. In the UK, researchers have developed a prototype for a house that can do just that – learn and adapt to its inhabitants. Called the InterHome, the concepts could change how consumers view energy, home automation and security, as well as present a compelling case for service providers to stake their claim in the InterHome of the future.

A dollhouse version of InterHome was developed by researchers at the University of Hertfordshire for the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition held in Cairo in July. The project made it to the top 12, but it’s also a concept that is ready to be taken to the real world, according to its developer Johann Siau, senior lecturer at the University's School of Electronic, Communication & Electrical Engineering. He along with the students involved are in discussions with companies in the building services, electric services, control and monitoring spaces, as well as the Building Research Establishment, to make InterHome a reality.

“[The idea] originally came from investigating the original system, which is quite complicated to set up,” Siau said. “There are a lot of users that need to be set up on the existing home automation system before they can actually get it to work. The idea [with InterHome] is to get the house to learn from your behavior and adapt itself to your behavior. It’s actually knows when you are at home and when you are out and it will automatically, optimally control your home for you.”

Read the full article in Telephony online.

Telco/IPTV subscribers to total almost 40 million households worldwide in 2009, with significant implications to digital home development
The number of subscribers worldwide to telco/IPTV services will approach 40 million by year-end 2009, according to international research firm Parks Associates.

The strong growth in telco/IPTV services is due partly to aggressive provider deployments, according to the firm’s new white paper IPTV and the Digital Home, but the most successful rollouts will incorporate multiple services, such as home networking, convergence in entertainment and communications features, and unique interactive services such as quality on-demand programming.

• In 2010, average PC home network throughput will exceed 150 Mbps in North America, ahead of throughput in Asia/Pacific and European households.
• Nearly 2/3 of consumer respondents from In-Stat’s survey expressed an interest in watching Internet Video on their TV 
• Two segregated home networks (HN) have been evolving– A service provider-centric network, and a PC-centric network. Each is leveraging different business models and technologies.
  

• Overview of the integrated digital home vision.
• The driving factors why networking over coax and phone wiring will be an integral part of that vision. 
• Why networking over coax and phone wiring is still primarily deployed in North America. 
• Key trends shaping current global deployments. 
• The growth potential of North American household service provider in-home entertainment networks and worldwide chipset shipments for 2007–2013. 
• MoCA and HomePNA shipments are segmented separately for 2007–2009. 
• Key current vendor ecosystems for MoCA and HomePNA, and comparisons of MoCA, HomePNA, and the developing ITU-T G.hn. 
• North American 2009 consumer survey results reflecting familiarity of and interest in purchasing coax/phone wiring adapters, interest in and price willing to pay for whole-home DVR services, and popular uses of home networks.