Manufacturers are developing approaches based chiefly on their core business, organised around a flagship device or a home network. But the complexity of consumption scenarios is gradually driving more decentralised, more user-centric solutions, combining local storage and online access.
In this still somewhat hazy context, although the lines of rivalry and cooperation between the players involved are beginning to be drawn, it is not even certain what stakes the digital home represents:
- Is it a form of leverage, to spur the sale of equipment and services?
- Is it a necessary condition for the development of a secure content market?
- Can it be a profit centre in and of itself?
Digital Home in brief
- The digital home's driving forces
- The digital home's key devices
- Different types of connectivity
- Different operators' solutions
- The major challenges facing the digital home
- 3 development scenarios
Issues
- PVRs
- Boxes
- Media Centres
- PCs
- Video game consoles
- Portable media players
- DVDs equipped with a hard drive
- Mobile devices
- ...
Key questions
- Are evolving consumption patterns enabling the development of the digital home?
- What are the digital home's key components?
- What positions are the different players taking - equipment manufacturers, ISPs, software house, telcos, Internet companies - and how are they evolving?
- What factors are critical to the digital home's development (usage, technologies)?
- What home network solutions are most likely to take hold?
Who should read this report?
Internet companies
- Understand operators' positioning and strategy with respect to services
- Assess the development of rival solutions, notably in partnership with telcos
Telcos (fixed and mobile)
- Understand Internet players' overall strategy
- Analyse the consumer electronics and computer approaches
Equipment manufacturers (consumer devices)
- Understand network operators' and Internet companies' digital home market strategies
- Evaluate the digital home market's potential
Investors and analysts
- Analyse the overall state of competition in the digital home market
- Identify the business models
Players
- Acer
- Apple*
- Archos*
- BT
- Deutsche Telekom
- France Telecom*
- Free*
- Freevo*
- Fujitsu*
- Google
- GPBVR*
- Home Gateway initiative*
- HP*
- Legrand*
- Microsoft*
- Motorola
- Nintendo Wii*
- Nokia
- Pace micro*
- Philips*
- Real
- Samsung
- Siemens*
- Sky*
- Sony*
- Sony Ericsson
- Thomson*
- TiVo
- Toshiba
- Vodafone
- Yahoo*
- ________________
- *detailed analysis provided