The connected home of the future: IPTV, the cloud and convergence

I spent a bit of time this week at the Avren Events Connected Home Global Summit 2010, listening to the great and good of the device and connectivity communities clashing swords over just what our smart homes of the future will look like. Will we all live in a Eureka-style S.A.R.A.H (Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat) one day soon?

The connected home, or smart home, has been talked about for a long time now, with very little progress being made in real terms. While the proliferation of electronic devices and gadgets has spread around the house like wildfire, ways of connecting them all together have been a bit thin on the ground.

So, will we actually have some sort of smart home in the future, or is there even any desire for one? And if we will, how long until it materialises - and more importantly for these guys, who will make all the profit?

IPTV, or internet television

IPTV is, in simple terms, television content coming to you over the internet (internet protocol television). IPTV is very much a reality, with the likes of BT Vision and Virgin Media already implementing it on a very basic consumer level.

The idea is that your television will access the internet so, as well as bringing you your normal TV functionality, you'll be able to access the likes of social networking programs, catch up TV, video on demand services etc directly from your TV.

This also opens up your broadband television for the kinds of widgets, or apps, that we're already enjoying on our smartphones and tablets - checking the weather, bus timetables, recipes, you name it.

Of course, not everyone is going to want to have a little Facebook section on their TV, or have an icon come up telling them the boss has emailed them in the middle of Master Chef.

However, to many the notion that a lot of tasks you currently squint at on a tiny screen can be done on the sofa in glorious HD is a tempting one.

One screen to rule them all?

So, if you lovely new IPTV is going to do everything, is there going to be a need for anything else? It would certainly seem so. Those in the know generally predicted a rise in the number of household screens, with the average household having smartphones, tablets and computers alongside their televisions.

You see, what will make the smart home smart is the fact the majority of this functionality will scale between devices regardless of screen size, communicating both wirelessly and over both fixed and mobile broadband, leading to a seamless transition of services from your 64-inch plasma screen behemoth in the living room to your little pocket-sized smartphone or tablet. At least that's the plan.

Generally, those talking at the Avren Events Connected Home Summit envisioned the smartphone as the key device in managing the smart home, with the tablet being the preferred format for the kitchen, sitting on the sofa etc (perhaps replacing the netbook or laptop in the future in many homes). 

While this may sound like bad news for the good old television, the likes of 3DTV and other future visual technologies should keep the TV as an integral part of our homes for the foreseeable future.

Security and health care in the connected home

You'll no doubt be pleased to hear the connected home idea isn't just about an endless stream of vacuous television channels being pumped into our eyeballs 24/7.

Two key areas being talked about in connection with smart homes are 'smart energy' (or the smart grid) and home security, with the two overlapping in some interesting areas.

At a basic level, home security means being able to monitor your home via your mobile broadband signal (via video cameras in your house), while the smart grid lets you take control of energy consumption in a similar way, remotely altering electrical appliances to save power.

These two can be interestingly combined when it comes to heath care, especially for elderly relatives and those with serious illnesses. Imagine being able to remotely set the lights to go off in the hallway if a movement sensor is triggered in the hallway, making it easier for a pensioner to get to the bathroom; or being able to activate a camera if a panic button was pressed?

Will the smart home have it's head in the cloud?

One of the key considerations talked about in discussions of the connected home was whether all this downloaded data would be stored in 'the cloud' (remotely, on the internet, with you accessing it when you need it) or in the home on devices (either hard drives, USB sticks etc).

Again, there did seem to be a general agreement in the conclusions made at the conference - local storage will be favourite for some time yet, but the cloud will begin to take a much larger percentage of our storage needs as mobile broadband in particular becomes faster and more reliable. Don't hold your breath then...

The main reason for this is that streaming information (such as HDTV programmes) will need to be super-fast before the cloud is really a viable option for sharing downloaded content between devices.

Connected conclusions

So, what is really going to happen - and more importantly, when?

The first thing to say is, don't hold your breath - the vast majority of people I spoke to at the Avren Events Connected Home Summit thought we'd be talking about exactly the same problems at the next summit. 

BT board member David Thorne made some interesting points in summary, remarking that throughout the conference no new services or products had been put on the table. He asked, do we need a new new, or to make the old new actually work and be more desirable?

One thing seems certain - 4G mobile broadband will need to be up and running, alongside fibre in the home, to really get things going. Then, the standards will need to be in place (like the Wi Fi Alliance has done so successfully) so that al our great devices can talk to each other in a consumer friendly plug and play way.

But even then, how are the manufacturers and broadband providers going to make us pay for all this new technology, which joins together a bunch of stuff we can already do? Therein lies the rub.