After a week at CES, I’ve learned that at this show, you can’t do without two things: water and sunglasses. Water, because the dry desert air can make you feel like a hundred-year-old alligator, and sunglasses, because the array of consumer electronic devices on the show floor is downright dazzling.
CES 2013 was both the largest in the show’s 45-year history and a stunning peek into each exhibitor’s vision of the electronic future. The nearly 2 million square feet of show floor simply knocked me out. Exhibitors dreamed up a world in which entertainment is piped into every room in our house, rides along with us in our cars, is carried in our purses and pockets, or is even delivered through our eyeglasses. The TV section alone was immense. Marvelous, bigger, sharper, thinner TVs and video-walls of one kind or another were everywhere. 3D! HD! Ultra HD! LED! OLED! 4K! 8K!
But what does all this new, higher-def hardware mean for the average consumer, who is unlikely to spend $25,000 on a television? Probably not very much.
Rovi, however, has a new concept for digital entertainment, and it’s meaningful for every consumer. It’s called Entertainment Unbound, and it advocates shifting the emphasis from the hardware to the user experience, putting all entertainment content wherever users want it, breaking it out of the living room and putting more content choices on multiple devices.
This is more than just “TV Everywhere,” a concept that has had a hard time gaining traction with everyday consumers–partly because consumers don’t know what it is and what it’s supposed to do for them that they can’t do already . Entertainment Unbound is about giving consumers what they really want – all video content, optimized and available to all platforms, accessible by any viewer, wherever they are.
Rovi is championing the concept because it is in a unique position to help the industry build out this future, given the advances it’s making in IPTV software, DivX DRM to further UltraViolet movie storage in the cloud, DivX Stash (a kind of DVR for the web), MainConcept encoders that will drive HEVC encoding, its vast store of entertainment metadata, and much more. We showcased 12 components of this brave new entertainment world in demos during CES, and the results have people talking.
For more on Entertainment Unbound and the digital entertainment future as Rovi sees it, read the inaugural edition of the Rovi Insights Series, now available on rovicorp.com.
Can you imagine a world in which Entertainment Unbound is fully embraced? What new place would you like to see your favorite movie or TV show? Tell us about it on Twitter or Facebook.
The Future: 4K Yes, Jetpacks No
Entertainment delivery is changing in big ways. Audiences now do their own programming, tune in on their schedule, discover what their friends watch via methods that didn’t exist five years ago, and expect higher quality no matter the delivery device.
If you’re a content provider, you have to know well in advance what technologies you need to pay attention to. Should you figure out how to encode for 4K? Will folks want to watch on their phones? What are the risks and benefits of cloud-based delivery like UltraViolet? Are banner ads in onscreen program guides cheesy or effective?
It’s like someone asked you to predict the future, and you’re not sure if you should invest in jetpacks.
Relax – we’ve got this
To make things easier for our customers across the entertainment ecosystem, Rovi has put together some research to help navigate this new, scary world. We have over 25 years of innovation in entertainment delivery, and we’re using what we’ve learned to give you the Rovi Insights Series, a periodic look at what’s happening in digital entertainment and where we think the industry is headed. These aren’t just our opinions, either – in the past two years, we’ve conducted more than 200 consumer studies in major markets. In this shifting landscape, this is expert research you can use.
4K, HEVC and you
We also examine:
Get it your way
Each volume of the Rovi Insights Series is available as a free multimedia download for iOS or Android phones and tablets, or as a downloadable PDF. Subscribe to the iOS or Android versions to get exclusive digital-only content and have future installments delivered right to your tablet or phone.
Armed with knowledge, you can make oracle-like choices, and your stress melts away.
See? Easy. No jetpacks required.
Want to know more?
Visit our webpage at rovicorp.com/insights, or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.