The most unsung device in the home is the humble Wi-Fi router. It’s the least talked about piece of tech in the industry, but has been the most transformative device of the past decade.
It makes the modern home possible, connecting more and more devices to the internet, from phones and laptops to TVs and doorbells. It’s getting hard to buy a fridge, a car, a washing machine or a security camera that doesn’t want to connect to your Wi-Fi.
It’s clear how much these changes reflect the evolving relationship between technology and entertainment. It’s this invisible web of connections that is transforming how we live, work and play, and being connected in every sense of the word is a key to success.
We all know the drama at home when the Wi-Fi goes down…
Digital home in action
Across Sky and Comcast, we have over 50m Wi-Fi routers in people’s homes. We are seeing first hand the digital home — the smart home — come to life.
We can see what the internet is being used for, what people are doing in their homes and how the home has changed in a world of working-from-home and home fitness.
And what we can see, above all else, is the internet is there to deliver entertainment. Over 80% of all traffic on our network is entertainment. The age of DVDs, CDs and even satellite cables is ending, being replaced by a world where all your TV, music, games, radio, podcasts and social media all come in as data streams.
Predicting the future
Sky saw this wave of change coming over a decade ago. Years before we launched Sky Glass, we started exploring the idea of a streaming TV, developing what we needed while we waited for the market to be ready.
We waited for customers to get Wi-Fi routers, waited for internet speeds to get quick enough and waited for media companies to hire software teams and build streaming apps.
Today, this streaming story has played out. Anyone can now send video instantly to millions of screens around the world, including the phone in your pocket. Content has exploded as a result, with hundreds of thousands of hours of video being created every day.
As this wave of change starts to settle, we can see another wave building: interactivity.
Of all the entertainment being distributed across the internet, the two biggest data streams are sport and video games. Whenever there’s a big football game or a video game has an update, internet traffic spikes, records get broken for the most traffic ever and we have to meet this new level of demand.
If the internet is there to deliver entertainment, then above all else it’s there to deliver sports and video games.
Extending interactivity with AI
Video games are at the leading edge of this new wave. The TV is already a highly interactive screen, with people spending hours a day playing games and interacting with content on the big screen. This interactivity is being extended beyond console games to casual games on Netflix and motion games on Sky Live.
AI is about to extend this interactivity further. It will enable two big changes.
First, AI agents and assistants will be able to pull data from anywhere in response to a simple request — something as simple as talking into the voice remote and asking for insurance quotes, for example.
Secondly, generative AI will be able to turn that data into a TV-friendly format. It will be able to generate video, music, graphics, voiceovers and even presenters — turning any data into content for the big screen. Instant TV that’s personalised and dynamic. TV that can change every second.
People will then interact with this generated content with their remote, with their voice, with motion gestures or even with game controllers or their phones. They will get all the power of the big-screen experience — big picture, big sound, shared screen — for content they normally see on a smaller, hard-to-share screen.
Everything that makes video games so compelling and popular will be brought to a wider range of content.
AI’s impact on TV and advertising
AI will be less about changing TV shows or changing TV advertising and more about bringing new content to the TV screen. Content that was previously locked in an app or website.
And AI will be about extending and enhancing TV shows and advertising. Adding a layer of interactivity to sports, for example, so you can see personalised ads in the stadium, or watch replays from impossible camera angles, or pick up a game controller and take the missed free kick again yourself.
For brands, it will extend TV advertising into commerce journeys, adding a layer of interactivity around product discovery, customer experience flows or sales funnels. That means digital brand engagement reformatted into something that feels more like TV and less like the web of old.
The most entertaining screen in your life is about to become the most useful.
Source: themedialeader.com
