Link Your House

As a flood of DLNA-certified televisions hit the market, the Digital Living Network Alliance is taking its message of interoperability among consumer devices to consumers themselves, hoping to build awareness of how DLNA certification makes it easier to connect TVs, PCs, and other digital media devices in the home.

“The first DLNA-certified TV was in 2006,” said Scott Smyers, chairman of the DLNA’s board of directors and senior vice president at Sony (NYSE: SNE). “Over the course of a couple of years, we ended up with a couple hundred certified TVs. Then over the last three months, we have tripled that. What I believe that represents is a clear recognition that network connectivity is important to consumers, now it’s a checkbox on the list of what they expect.”

The very rapid uptake in using the Internet for content delivery has made Internet connections to set-top boxes and televisions more popular and DLNA represents a standard approach to doing that. More than 400 TV models have been DLNA certified in the past three months, bringing the total to 699 models. DLNA, an industry consortium of more than 200 technology companies from consumer electronics and mobile device makers to service providers, sets connectivity standards and offers certification that devices meet those standards so that consumers know those digital media devices and services will interoperate.

In addition to TV sets, among other devices currently DLNA-certified are a number of digital cameras and camera phones as well as game consoles such as the Sony Playstation 3, Smyers said. With so many devices coming onto the market, the DLNA, which has been working since 2003, is now turning its focus from being a business-to-business organization to one that reaches out to consumers.

“With this blip in TVs, we are almost on the late side, but we decided last year to start taking our story to retailers and through them to consumers,” Smyers said. “The time is right for consumers to understand DLNA.”

A new marketing director and public relations agency is charged with helping raise that visibility so that consumers know to ask for DLNA-certified TV sets or understand what it means when a TV set is advertised as DLNA-certified, Smyers said.

“If retailers understand this, they can create an island in their stories with these devices, where all the stuff is connected so that consumers can see the value,” Smyers said.  

Service providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon are part of the DLNA and its Content and Service Provider Task Force, and have an opportunity to use the availability of new devices to their advantage, Smyers said.

“The model is changing,” Smyers said. “ The access to content provided over the Internet, which is all on-demand and improving in quality, is growing. Internet connections are becoming capable of supporting a very viewable stream.”

Unless they want to try to block that stream – a strategy which is doomed to failure, Smyers said – service providers need to try to vary their own products to add value.

“I think they are doing the right things,” Smyers said. “Now that they are getting competition for broadcast services from the Internet, they are stepping up to try to vary their products. You are going to see a lot of different things and a lot of experimentation. The traditional model of hook up your box to your TV and sell your service is gone.”

The high-end installation market is another one being impacted by DLNA and other changes in digital media, Smyers said.

“There already is an industry of professional installers that put in high-end equipment, speakers in the wall and wires and home theaters,” Smyers said. “They have tended to be very expensive. But with digital, bits is bits – if you can get the bits from the source to the big screen TV, you’re set. The price for the installs is going to come under some pressure. You can get a really good system buying a commodity 1080p TV with Ethernet running to your entertainment center. Consumers are responding to that and going for more commodity equipment rather than premium one-off type of equipment that they pay an installer to set up for them.”

Service providers have a role to play in the market, particularly when they install their own premium TV services such as AT&T’s U-verse and Verizon’s FiOS, Smyers said. Sony and other consumer electronics makers have a potential role as well. Sony offers a Backstage service that, for an additional fee, provides professionals to install equipment and get it working.

“We have learned that if you help consumers toward that, the time invested is pretty minimal, but return rates go down and consumer satisfaction goes way up,” Smyers said.

Samsung has announced its new 8500-series HDTVs, featuring local-dimming LED backlighting and Yahoo's Widget Engine for accessing Internet-based content.

Samsung has formally announced its new 8500-series HDTVS, featuring local-dimmer LED backlighting that helps boost the units' dynamic contrast ratio of 7,000,000:1—plus the 8500-series features the Yahoo Widget Engine to tap into Internet-based content like news, weather, video, and services like Flickr.

"For consumers who are looking for the ultimate HD centerpiece and high-level performance in their home theater, the Samsung 8500 Series delivers break-through quality and design," said Samsung Electronics America's senior Vp of visual display marketing John Revie, in a statement "The 8500 Series underscores Samsung's dedication to providing a full range of HDTVs that not only achieve the highest levels of picture quality, but also provide unique and immersive entertainment experiences."

The 8500-series sets feature Samsung's Auto Motion Plus frame interpolation technology to back up the units' 240 Hz refresh rates; the units also offer Samsung's Wide Color Enhancer Pro for vibrant colors and a "Natural" mode that's designed to optimize display settings to play to the strengths of LCDs while modeling the richness of a plasma display.

The 8500 series also feature Samsung's Medi@ 2.0 suit, enabling users to tap into Samsung's Internet@TV offering developed in conjunction with Yahoo: it can tap into a wide range of Yahoo news and information services, as well as popular online destinations like Twitter and YouTube. The technology also offers wires and wireless DLNA compatibility to tap media from PCs on a home network, and two USB 2.0 connections enable users to tap into media stored on external devices. The sets also feature 4 HDMI inputs (three in back, one on the side), 1 component input, 1 Ethernet connection, 1 optical output, and 1 PC input.

The 8500-series sets will be available in August, with the 46.9-inch unit carrying a suggested price of $3,599.99, while the 54.6-inch model will go for $4,499.99.

Television manufacturers will ship about 20 million wireless-networked TVs globally in 2011, ABI Research said today. That year, wireless-networked TVs will account for about 11% of total flat-screen shipments, up from about 2% this year, said Michael Inouye, industry analyst with ABI.

The expected jump in Web-connected home-entertainment components reflects both falling TV prices as well as an expanding amount of television and film content available for either downloading or video-streaming from companies such as Netflix, Blockbuster and Amazon.com. Last month, Boston-based research firm Yankee Group estimated that annual sales of Web-connected TVs would surge to about 50 million in 2013 from about 6 million this year, with next year's Super Bowl being a key demand catalyst.

"There are a wide range of expectations for this facet of the market, and most consider the 2009 holiday season into 2010 as the critical period to gauge its potential," said Inouye, adding that manufacturers have spent little to promote wireless-networked TVs.

Although the cost of making a television network-accessible is "relatively low," adding the software necessary for wi-fi connectivity could add as much as $100 in costs per television, according to Inouye.

Consumers will spend about $2.9 billion on video content that's streamed from the Internet to TVs in 2013, up from about $600 million this year, research firm In-Stat said in a report in May. By that year, about 24 million broadband-connected households will regularly watch online videos on their TVs, up from about 2.5 million this year, according to In-Stat, which is a sister company of Video Business.

Get ready to add the IP multimedia phone to your shopping list. The technology is being touted to become the “fourth screen” in your home due to its ability to marry the Internet and social media applications with voice calling and real-time IP video conferencing.

You may have thought that the PC was going to become the primary method of video teleconferencing. Not according to market researcher In-Stat, which calls the IP phone the “fourth screen” in the home to complement the PC, TV and mobile handset. In-Stat estimates that consumer multimedia phones will generate between $4 billion and $8 billion in annual revenue, worldwide, by 2013.

Driving the influence of multimedia phones is consumers’ desires for the ability to deliver “visual communications.”

Each year, as typical broadband speeds get faster, it makes it easier to deliver real-time applications and real-time video calling.

So an application that was once reserved only for big businesses that could afford the exorbitant equipment and network access costs to support this alternative to corporate business travel, is now ready for the residential market.

Broadband Enables IP Phones More Easily
According to Pew Internet & American Life Project, it is estimated that as of December 2008, 57 percent of adults in the U.S. had broadband access at home, compared with 42 percent in March 2006 and to 30 percent in March 2005.

Products on the market like Grandstream Networks’ GXV3140 IP multimedia phones (suggested retail price $299) enable users to communicate for free right out of the box using plug-and-play, peer-to-peer technology. By plugging the phone into the broadband router at home, within minutes the phone is ready to make video calls with zero configuration.

The key benefits of IP phones are:

• The media phone combines the power of a PC with the always-on functionality of the home telephone.
• Allows you to make free voice and video calls worldwide upon simple plug-in installation.
• Integrated Web browser lets users access personalized RSS feeds of real time online information services, such as news updates, stock updates, weather forecasts, recipes and directory searches.
• One-touch access to Internet radio stations and online music networks such as Last.fm, Yahoo Flickr Web photo album, video and social networks.
• Allows for IM capability with Yahoo/MSN/Google.
• Offers always-on, one-touch access to Internet activities including accessing entertainment content (YouTube videos, movie clips, and music).
• Access to Yahoo! Flickr web photo album, alarm clock, calendar, games, music ring tones.
• Other capabilities include the ability to act as a digital photo frame, calendar and alarm clock, along with multiple language support and the ability to an plug into computer or TV for larger picture display.