In the U.S. market, the percentage of broadband households owning and connecting at least one product besides PCs to the Internet has increased 45 percent between 2010 and 2011. Today, approximately 40 percent of all U.S. broadband households own at least one Internet-connected device, with game con...

"The connected home" is a term used frequently but often defined ambiguously. Consumer electronics manufacturers, the PC industry, pay-television service providers and broadband providers are driving the development of the connected home, for obvious reasons, as the interplay of these elements expan...

Blockbuster and Samsung recently announced that Blockbuster OnDemand will be available on select connected HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and home theater systems starting in the fall of 2009. Samsung will offer connected Blu-ray players and home theater systems with both the Netflix and Blockbuster online...

Two different types of media uses are propelling the vision for a connected consumer electronics home. These two concepts -- media server and cloud media -- increase the value of television, as well as other devices, by increasing the ability to discover, aggregate, access and display different type...

Broadband penetration has increased -- over the past three years, the UK, Italy, Spain, Germany and France have added roughly 50 million new broadband households -- and brought social media usage up along with it. Currently, almost 40 percent of broadband households in those countries use a social n...

Social networking has left an indelible mark on consumers in terms of the way they connect and interact with each other. Sites such as Facebook are adding users at an incredible rate, and the online dating site Match.com reported good growth in the latter stages of 2008. Parks Associates has found ...

Ten years ago, the "smart home" was all the rage. Almost every company in our market had a concept center or display house that showed the functionality of the digital home. I remember a visit to GTE's offices in the Dallas area, where they had a multiroom digital home display that showed a variety ...

The competitive environment that characterizes today's broadband and value-added services landscape benefits the growth of many digital lifestyle products and services. Consumers are also primary beneficiaries of increased competition among carriers. Case studies reveal that when at least two servic...

The market to distribute premium video content -- mainly TV episodes and feature-length movies -- is currently going through one of its most dynamic periods, as experimentation with business models, delivery mechanisms and consumer tastes is in full swing. In the age of online entertainment, consume...

Consumers have embraced digital media, primarily content such as music, photos and video. They generate their own content, transfer their analog data to digital formats, and download media from the Internet. The percentage of U.S. households with platforms for image and video capture, as well as mus...

The European broadband, communications and television landscape is not just characterized by intense competition among telephone providers. The cable operators, telcos and satellite providers not only need to keep a close eye on each other, but also players delivering digital terrestrial television ...

Well, Blockbuster has finally done it. After years of simply copying the Netflix business practices, it's definitely done something that Netflix is probably never going to do -- offer to buy Circuit City. I find Blockbuster's actions to be confusing and inconsistent. In their last quarterly call, Bl...

There is no question that the marriage between consumer electronics devices and broadband content will be a key trend in 2008. For content providers and aggregators, a "go-to-TV" strategy solves at least one of the early challenges facing broadband video services -- the requirement to watch the cont...

Many video providers, particularly in the television and movie spaces, made significant strides to provide their content via a growing number of on-demand channels, including the Internet, in 2005. For video providers, the decision to embrace on-demand distribution was born as a response to both the...

The advent of digital distribution for theatrical, television and user-generated content comes at a time of enormous pressure for the traditional entertainment industry. The industry enjoyed years of strong returns at the box office and from DVD rentals and sales from the late 1990s into the early p...

The competitive environment that characterizes today's broadband and value-added services landscape should certainly grow a variety of digital lifestyle products and services, including home networking. Consumers are also primary beneficiaries of increased competition among carriers. Case studies re...

The use of a home network largely as a broadband-sharing mechanism is just the first of several stages in the evolution of home networking. Both consumers and carriers will use connectivity for applications beyond shared Internet. For consumers, the desire to share multimedia content among different...

Devin Gordon's article "Why TV is Better than the Movies," provides good fodder for discussion about the changing nature of the content business, particularly movies and television in the age of the Internet download. Both TV and film face similar threats -- highly fragmented audiences, the challeng...

The use of a home network largely as a broadband-sharing mechanism is just the first of several stages in the evolution of connectivity. For example, while we predict that by year-end 2010, nearly 40 million U.S. households -- and an estimated 180 million worldwide households -- will have data netwo...

With the December announcement that NDS, a provider of technology solutions for digital pay-TV, acquired Jungo, a residential gateway software provider, we're continuing to witness consolidation in the market to deliver complete end-to-end access and service-provider solutions. The purchase also rea...