22nd August, 2008
Bad News For Best Buy. Good News For You.
Brent Butterworth
The CEDIA Expo doesn’t start until early September, but manufacturers and PR firms usually begin pitching new products to the press in June. We at The Integrator realized that by combining a diligent review of the pre-show press release, some thoughtful divination, and a few wild guesses, we could predict the trends at the show weeks before we enter the doors of the Colorado Convention Center.
So if you read this column, you can, in theory, focus on schmoozing and partying rather than worrying about the details of, say, new doorbell modules for multiroom systems.
So what did we find in our reading? Lots of new A/V furniture. Lots of new TV mounts. New cable management products. New touchscreen control systems. New iPod docks. And a lot more.
Where, you ask, is the trend in that hodgepodge of “solutions”? Well, it’s not there. The trend is in what you don’t see: major introductions of mainstream audio and video products.
Of course, the Sonys and Samsungs and Panasonics of the world don’t always wait around for CEDIA to show off their latest wares. But throughout the spring and summer, we’ve seen the product introductions from these companies, and frankly, we have a hard time recalling any particular standouts.
We may have reached a point of diminishing returns with conventional audio and video gear. For example, the murmurs from display manufacturers hint at future 240 Hz refresh rates and 4K resolution, but neither of those technologies is likely to deliver a dramatic improvement in anything short of a 20-seat home theater. There are some promising display technologies in the future, such as ultra-thin OLED screens, but large OLED displays are a few years off—and the roll-up OLED screens we’ve been promised will probably take much longer.
While the big guys seem to be wondering where to go from here, the small- to medium-sized companies that focus on A/V integrators are bursting with exciting ideas. Consider SpeakerCraft’s new interface that lets the iPhone and the iPod Touch control its multiroom audio systems. Now your clients can pull out their iPhones when they walk in the house and immediately call up their favorite music, radio station, etc. No keypad needed. Sooloos includes something similar in the latest software revision for its music servers. And I know of at least one more manufacturer who’s pursuing the same path.
If Best Buy has anything this sexy that they can offer their customers, we haven’t seen it. In fact, barring some major unforeseen revolution in audio or video, it looks to us as if the mass merchants will mostly be stuck serving the replacement market.
On the other hand, integrators have at their disposal the offerings of many dozens (or even hundreds) of small, innovative companies. At the CEDIA Expo, it’s a safe bet we’re going to see countless speakers in cool new form factors, more entries in the outdoor TV market, and fresh approaches to home automation that will bring it to a wider audience. (We could list more, too, but on much of this stuff we’re under NDA until the show starts.)
It doesn’t look as if there will be any new audio/video product in the next couple of years that Best Buy can use to captivate its customers. But any good integrator ought to be able to dazzle clients with technologies they haven’t seen and new form factors they’ll love. If you can’t, you really should dig deeper at this year’s Expo, because the products and technologies you need will all be there.
Posted at 12:01 am |
