Habitech’s Justin Martin-Lawrence, Jonathan Pengilley and Charles Redgrave-Plumb don their mystic weeds to deliver personal visions of CI’s future…
Justin Martin-Lawrence: content is king, so what are you doing about it?
It isn’t particularly Delphic to imagine a world of wider streaming choice and ever-smarter home control. There’s no question that access to content will continue to drive the shape of the smart home and CI’s role within it.
Two distinct markets for smart home control are evolving. At one end you have the IoT cosmos, and at the other, the CI sphere. Driven by the media giants using content streamed over Wi-Fi, controlled from smartphone and voice enabled, the IoT phenomenon is aimed at making average homes ‘smart’. Truly democratic pricing allows inexpensive and easy access to the servers of Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Spotify, Tidal et al. In this market, streaming devices dominate, but the trajectory will inspire many more AV manufacturers to place cloud access (like Chromecast built-in) inside their products. This will create a growing ecosystem of home devices that intuitively join the home LAN, making it effortless for the owner to appreciate wider content choice via their smartphone or tablet: DIY control for all, no programming required.
At the expensive end, the original CEDIA vision still predominates, centralising distribution and deploying proprietary interfaces requiring big programming inputs and macros to simplify home control, giving the owner a few buttons to press on a wall panel or remote handset. Against the extraordinary technical achievements of IoT, this model is heading for a big reboot.
The big question for me is whether the progress of time will bring the two together. Could the custom future combine the instant network discovery and zero programming of IoT with the unifying nature of current proprietary control systems? I’m picturing an inclusive ‘Jetson’s’ style whole-house tableau including voice activation mixed with local control over all content and every device from a universal interface mirrored on TVs and smart devices. Is this utopian fantasy? The answer, alas, is probably yes, because even though protocols exist across platforms, there will always be proprietary systems that won’t integrate. Brands like B&O and Meridian for instance have their own way of doing things, and unless manufacturers undergo profound transformation, the instinct will be to keep their technology in-house and deny easy compatibility with rival products. This realpolitik will prolong the necessity for integrators to instal third-party drivers, at least in the immediate future.
Even so, the next generation of control systems is set to simplify the mechanics. Our new distribution brand Netvio for instance has gone outside the industry to introduce an extremely powerful network design interface, where IoT-type practicality meets convention. It allows HDBT and AVoIP to be mixed and controlled within the same system, and through an innovation called ‘micro-drivers’, offers a much more convenient way to generate the control codes. It also provides easy end-user control through a complementary smartphone app. As such, Netvio signals a new direction for home control.
Elsewhere, greater IoT effortlessness is sure to emerge from wider voice control integration. The huge investment needed to deploy this feature is on a scale that CI manufacturers will never be able to replicate, so I’m expecting many more to embrace Alexa and Siri, symbolising another likely area of future convergence.
Manufacturers will also need to design products that exploit properly installed Wi-Fi, because while some, like Sky Q, insist on meshing with their own Wi-Fi networks, the inevitability of ever faster internet speed means that Wi-Fi, and the skills needed to preserve and manage data in whole-house scenarios, will take on a far greater significance. Which is why we’ve been supporting this skillset since 2012. More than ever before you'll need the most capable networking hardware and WI-Fi6 to broadcast soaring content payloads to data-hungry devices. Before too long, 10G, multi-gig and fibre will become your only networking options.
Again, you don’t need to be an oracle to predict the eventual dominance of fibre TTP and the possibility of connecting Gigabit speeds all the way from the router to a matrix/switch and then to a fibre port on the device. I believe the future for wired networks is baked-in, along with the emergence of AVoIP as the principal carrier in resi installs, in parallel with wireless networks fast enough to carry 4K and above (with Atmos sound) uncompressed around the home. It’s not impossible to imagine a future in which all you’ll need to distribute big data is to run power to devices and APs.
So, while a single unifying streaming/control platform covering every room, recognising every device and providing universal access to content is for the birds, there will be areas of IoT/CI convergence which will make things more intuitive for you and your customers. For me CI’s future role and greatest technical challenge is to be able to design robust ultra-fast Wi-Fi, which overcomes all physical barriers in the exceptional homes we transform. Master this and things will get easier all-round.
Jonathan Pengilley: take advantage of green initiatives
I believe that future CI will embrace a broader range of products, that product cost will come down and that demand and opportunities will increase. For instance, although one-in-ten new smart homes has smart lighting today, this is expected to rise to nine-in-ten by 2050. What’s more, there needs to be a sea change in electricity infrastructure, because the grid will be called upon to support rocketing numbers of smart devices in the home and chargers on the driveway. Under current plans, the sale of new petrol and diesel cars will be banned from 2030, so CI installers should invest in adding electrical experience to their offering. The Government’s Electric Vehicle Homecharge Scheme (EVHS) grant currently provides a 75% contribution to the cost of one charge point, capped at £350, but this is likely to increase with the pressure to hit net zero by 2050. I’d think about a future strategy that includes a focus on green initiatives, because outreach of this kind is bound to pay dividends.
Charles Redgrave-Plumb: future homes do all the thinking
I’d agree with Justin in predicting that complex, centralised control systems will become a thing of the past. Entertainment delivery will move to casting as apps like Spotify and Netflix enforce the use of their own app-based platforms, and there will be a generational shift in control towards phones and tablets as younger family members will expect to use their phones for everything in the home.
Control interfaces with multiple responses based on time-of-day are the future. For example, a button press at midday could turn on specific lights and music and the same button press after nightfall could prompt the operation of lights and blinds. And homes will be expected to respond to external conditions: sunset triggering lights up and blinds down. I believe that home automation with minimal human involvement will become the norm, so that homes intuitively know what their owners need and when they need it.