The myth of the digital home

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The digital home | Science fiction? | Economist.com:
The digital home: Science fiction?
Sep 1st 2005 | SAN FRANCISCO


Their first challenge in stimulating any sort of consumer interest is the difficulty of merely explaining what the digital home is supposed to be.

That is not at all what they want to do today, however. Another study by Parks Associates found that 89% of people with a home-computer network felt that the relatively modest goal of sharing internet access is its most important function, with printer-sharing the second priority.

All this points to a huge problem with the digital-home vision: the lack, among most consumers, of any sense of crisis about the status quo in entertainment. “We don't think many folks are looking for an electronic nerve centre in their homes,” says Pip Coburn

After all, popping in a DVD, say, is so easy and works so well. By contrast, getting a digital home up and running promises several lost weekends of fiddling with manuals and settings, and hefty expenses in new gear. According to Mr Coburn's formula for evaluating new technologies, whereby adoption is a function of the users' sense of crisis (ie, motivation to change) outweighing their perceived pain of switching, the digital home ranks as a clear “loser”.

“If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed,” says Peter Lee, an executive at Disney. The same goes for codecs. “The user shouldn't know or care what format they're using,” says James Poder, an engineer at Comcast, America's largest cable company and broadband internet service provider, because “consumers don't want to be IT administrators for their own home.”