Fifty-five million Americans have used a voice assistant, like Alexa or Siri, and 72% of them incorporate it into their
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C E S 2018:
N E W S YO U C A N U S E The 51st annual CES didn’t disappoint. From smart home appliances to self-driving cars, the world’s largest trade show delivered on what’s new and noteworthy in consumer technology. Much has changed over recent years. Our connected devices are now listening and learning. We’re sharing and analyzing more within the cloud. And technology has allowed us to deliver more personalized, targeted and meaningful customer experiences.
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Throughout the week, the Yamamoto team joined 200k+ attendees in experiencing how these advances are impacting our present and influencing our future. And while we’ll get to a few of the shiny objects and future predictions, let’s first look at how our present is being changed.
BUT CAN YOU TRUST A TV THAT’S ALWAYS LISTENING? Monitoring how the vocal assistant market grows will give us the answer to what the average person thinks about that question.
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V O I C E A P P L I C AT I O N S A R E U B I Q U I TO U S A N D L I F E - C H A N G I N G . Voice technology was the star. Fifty-five million Americans have used a voice assistant, like Alexa or Siri, and 72% of them incorporate it into their daily lives. That number, led by Google and Amazon adoption, is primed to increase quickly with new entrants making big splashes.
Fifty-five million Americans have used a voice assistant, like Alexa or Siri, and 72% of them incorporate it into their daily lives.
Samsung’s intelligent voice assistant, Bixby, will show up in TVs and smart home appliances this year, and they’ll all be connected to each other. Your Samsung TV will be able to give you the weather (okay, it can kind of do that already), control your lights, play Spotify and much more. Through a partnership with The Take, an artificial intelligence technology, it will even be able to identify and purchase exact matches for over 10,000,000 products seen on shows and in movies—product placement will reach a whole new level. LG also made a big push in smart home innovation this year, most exciting of which are their SmartThinQ (pronounced Think-Q) smart appliances. Your fridge will let you look inside without opening the doors, it will monitor the freshness of your groceries and it will read aloud recipes for you. Not only will these devices be able to do more, they’ll also be able to listen better. Voice recognition is improving this year, including different voices for different accounts, natural language understanding and improved context and speed.
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5 G W I L L P OW E R A S M A R T E R A N D M O R E CO N N E C T E D WORLD The explosion and utilization of voice assistants is building an IoT infrastructure that will connect and control all aspects of your life. And behind this infrastructure will be the 5G (r)evolution. Why? Because 4G isn’t powerful enough to power all these smart devices.
4G isn’t powerful enough to power all these smart devices.
It isn’t just cars and devices that are getting smarter. Thanks to narrow-band IoT connectivity and 5G, “smart cities” are popping up across the world. Recently, Ericsson partnered with the city of Dallas to provide a smart system that can aggregate and analyze diverse, real-time data from traffic sensors and cameras. Translation? The ability to dynamically control traffic lights, school flashers and message signs, and the death of the traffic timer.
and desktop content. They’re investing in mobile apps and building a social media presence to engage viewers on their time. The results–according to Turner CEO John Martin–are impressive. The network reached 70% of US millennials at least once during the last month. And over half of CNN viewing is done on-demand. Their channel investments have also captured a diverse audience segment: the average viewer of CNN on linear TV is age 52, desktop is 42, mobile app is 32 and snapchat is 24. AVERAGE VIEWER ON CNN BY DEVICE AND AGE
5G-capable mobile devices are already on the market, and the next-gen network is already in trials, with major consumer deployment slated for 2018. When it arrives, it will enable every device to connect, share and react–and do so with up to 10x faster speeds, zero latency streaming (that’s as fast as your home’s fiber-optic connection) and better battery life. Oh, and those autonomous cars arriving soon? Well, they’ll create 1.7 terabytes of data each day. Without 5G handling that data, autonomous driving isn’t possible.
10x FASTER SPEED
5G
ZERO LATENCY STREAMING
BETTER BATTERY LIFE
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S U CC E S S F U L C S P s M E E T N E W G E N E R AT I O N S W H E R E T H E Y A R E , WITH NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY. We’re past the world of cord-cutters and entering the world of cord-nevers, so traditional CSPs are having to become more creative in the way they package and deliver content.
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What’s ahead? More of the same. Today 84% of 6–12 yearolds are using tablets, and 77% use smartphones on a weekly basis. There’s pressure to deliver quality on-demand content to them. That means appointment viewing is going away, and it’s harder and harder for a single “hit” to drive network profits. It’s a race to find fans–do what it takes to keep them– and elongate engagement. From there, innovation builds success. And continued success builds institutional muscle memory. TECHNOLOGY USAGE BY 6–12 YEAR-OLDS
84% USE TABLETS
77% USE SMARTPHONES Millennials made streaming popular. Gen-Z (born after 2001) grew up on it–most don’t remember a time without streaming. In recent years, this trend has forced providers, such as Turner Broadcasting, to think beyond linear TV
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We expect millions of fully self-driving cars on roads worldwide by 2025.
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SHINY OBJECTS AND FUTURE PREDICTIONS
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Back to the future. While consumer adoption is still some time ahead for most, the innovation quick-hits below are worth watching: DRONES We experienced a huge drop in exhibitors from the 2017 show, but our skies are about to be inundated with drones. Americans have already registered over 1 million drones with the FAA. As the floodgates open, the technology and use cases are growing exponentially (inspecting dangerous or hard-to-reach areas, delivering goods or emergency supplies, etc.).
Americans have already registered over 1 million drones with the FAA. VIRTUAL REALITY We’re still in the early stage for VR. However, major growth is on its way, thanks to better, cheaper hardware (Oculus Go, Google Daydream), emergence of content beyond gaming (Amazon, Hulu) and improved image quality. To put it in perspective, 10 million devices shipped in 2017, whereas 60 million are expected to ship in 2021.
AUGMENTED REALITY Augmented reality is becoming more practical and less clunky, design-wise. New innovations like the Alexa-compatible Vuzix Blade and Apple’s ARKit have captured our attention and demonstrate the future of now. AUTONOMOUS CARS The amount of space devoted to cars at CES has doubled since 2015. And with good reason, as we expect millions of fully self-driving cars on roads worldwide by 2025. Among them–Toyota’s mobile commerce concept vehicle, e-Palette. With partnerships in place with Amazon and Pizza Hut (among others), be ready for the influx of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) businesses.
Thinner, faster, clearer. What sounds like a New Year’s resolution is actually the takeaway on TV product design this year. For example, Samsung teases us again with “The Wall,” a tiled, up-to-146” modular television without seams. Trends to watch in 2018 include the war between QLED and OLED, eventual adoption of 4K, and soon we’ll be able to watch reruns of Full House the way they were meant to be seen with the eventual introduction of 8K. ROBOTS Robots were everywhere. Singing and dancing, playing pingpong, and now, thanks to Dutch startup Somnox, robots helping you sleep. For many of the robot innovations at CES, we have a way to go before the utility and price tag are embraced by general consumers. But that hasn’t stopped us from envisioning a future with our own server robots (LG’s CLOi), luggage porter robots, shopping cart robots and animal companion robots (Sony’s Aibo).
