Summary
The number and breadth of products connected to home networks continues to increase. 35 million households in the US have data networks, and the figure is expected to grow by 50 million by 2012. Just 10 years ago there were only 2.8 million households with data networks.
Analysis
Less than 1% of US households have an "entertainment network" that connects hard-drive based consumer electronics devices to other network-capable devices for sharing rich content. Devices in these networks include TV´s, DVD players, media servers, gaming consoles, and other computing devices.
Service providers will play a major role in expanding the penetration of home networks and multimedia- or entertainment-oriented networking products centered on the delivery of Web-based content, primarily video.
Energy management concerns will continue to drive the installation of networked home automation systems.
There will arise a highly abstracted "home storage utility" that will hide the complexity of storage in consumer devices, handle data transfers, including backup and indexes, and automatically generates appropriate metadata for that content.
Total digital storage device capacity for all storage devices shipped into the home could reach 650 exabytes by 2013. At the same time, accumulated consumer data by 2013 is expected to be about 760 exabytes.
This author consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
