Industry Experts Answer: What product or technology do you expect to have the most influence on the connected home in 2019?
Voice control will continue to grow in the home in 2019. I’m often reminded of how many consumers don’t know they can turn on their music by asking or they can change lighting scenes or adjust the temperature of their home. As the consumer continues to understand what is available and the simplicity of it, we will continue to see this technology influence the market.
– Heather Sidorowicz, President/Owner, Southtown Audio Video
Lighting fixtures are the biggest focus for Cloud9 Smart in 2019. With high-voltage fixtures from Ketra, Lutron, and USAI, as well as low-voltage fixtures from LumaStream and Coastal Source, we are able to cover solutions for indoors and outdoors, from basic, warm dim, tunable white, circadian, and RGB.
– Chris Smith, COO, Cloud9 Smart
This year, homeowners are going to be looking for two upgrades: networking and 4K. As the connected home continues to increase and options expand, consumers will need to upgrade their home Wi-Fi capabilities to increase the speed of incoming and outgoing information with new higher capability routers, more access points, and other devices.
– Dennis Holzer, Executive Director, PowerHouse Alliance
As homeowners take on more technology, remote monitoring and analytics and both a strong networking and power foundation are necessary to support their systems and help dealers with management and troubleshooting.
– Lauren Simmen Christina, Director, Marketing at AMETEK Powervar; AMETEK Electronic Systems Protection
Streaming services and the popularity of voice control are connected home categories where we are seeing continuous growth. As an AV manufacturer, it is essential to offer high-quality wireless speakers and electronics that are easy to setup and control from the palm of your hand or with a simple voice command.
– Mark Corbin, President, Vanco International
I expect human-centric or “tunable” lighting is going to be a big product category for the design-minded integrator. The aesthetic and “wellness” benefits of this are already on the minds of architects and interior designers, and the concept is easy to grasp for consumers, too. I think integrators will find themselves not only invited to the project earlier, but they will see a nice uptake in project size, too.
– Josh Christian, Director of Certification, Home Technology Association
I think voice recognition is going to have a breakout year. It’s been on the cusp for the past few, but it looks like the technology has finally matured enough to where it’s going to start making an impact.
– Greg Margolis, President, HomeTronics
This year we will see even more work toward conversational speech recognition by our devices. If we don’t get past the canned way that we have been communicating with our devices and allow it to become more conversational, I believe consumers will lose interest.
– Bill Skaer, President, Bill Skaer Home Theater & Technology
Cord cutting has accelerated over the last few years, but the promise of Ultra HD/4K (even 8K), wide color gamut, and object-based audio from ATSC 3.0, free of charge, makes antenna installations compelling. Beyond ATSC 3.0, antennas have the unique ability to eliminate the threat of carriage agreement disputes between broadcasters and MVPDs (aka satellite and cable).
– Dave Pedigo, A/VEC
