One of the worlds leading magazines The Economist claim that technology firms are pushing a futuristic vision of home entertainment not because consumers are desperate for it but because they themselves are.
They claim that at one of the fast-proliferating conferences devoted to the "digital home", John Burke, an executive at Motorola, a maker of mobile phones and digital gadgets, showed a video that presented his company's version of this vision. In the clip, a youngish man wakes up to a rock video that automatically starts playing on a screen next to his bed. He gets up to have breakfast and the rock video follows him to a screen in the kitchen. He moves into the living room and up pops the rock video on yet another screen. When he leaves his flat and gets into his car, the video starts playing on a screen in the steering wheel.
To ordinary humans this sort of thing must seem like silly—or downright frightening—marketing claptrap. In fact, even Mr Burke's audience of self-selected technophiles seemed sceptical. "Did you notice that the guy was a bachelor," said Tim Dowling, the boss of Pure Networks, a software firm in Seattle that helps users to set up and troubleshoot home-computer networks. "That alone tells you that they're out of touch. I thought: How dumb." Real people do not want to be hounded through their home and their life by some video stream, he argues; they just want help with basic headaches, such as getting the kids' laptop, mom's Apple Macintosh and dad's Windows machine to share the family's printer.
Whether or not computer, software, consumer-electronics, telecoms, cable and internet companies are in fact out of touch with consumers may be the biggest question facing these industries today. That is because the "digital home", a concept and category hugely hyped in executive circles but still rarely heard in discussions among consumers, represents their greatest hope for revenue growth. Demand from corporate buyers of technology has barely recovered from the dotcom bust and is widely expected to be unimpressive for years. By contrast, the homes of consumers appear to technology vendors as a barely tamed analogue wilderness. Darcy Travlos, an analyst at CreditSights, a research firm, estimates the market opportunity of the digital home at $250 billion in America alone and $1 trillion worldwide in three to seven years.
