(see the previous 3 posts for background; part I, part II, part III)

Is the concept of the digital home redundant now? Have events bypassed “something that never was”? No. While the need for a self-contained system in a consumers home with storage, intelligence and management may have been superseded by high bandwidth / availability broadband and cloud services, the things that I believed consumers would need from digital services, devices, and applications are still true — and in many cases still haven’t been provided by today’s technology.

Future trends that fall under the “digital home” umbrella include:

• The fight for “aggregation hubs.” Streaming services have made an impression, and the seamless delivery of content — ranging from e-books to videogames and device applications — now happens as a matter of course. However, these services are still fragmented; a range of suppliers (Amazon, Steam, iTunes) requires different interfaces and supports different client devices. Global titans like Google, Apple, Amazon, and even Microsoft want to bring all this together via individual or household user accounts that tie together all your legitimate movies, music, applications, and e-books. The successful firm becomes a trusted resource for the consumer — and can corner the market in upselling or advertising to them.
• Network refinement. Wi-Fi still isn’t the networking nirvana that device makers would have you believe; at the very least, it can be complemented with other technologies like NFC, Bluetooth, or 4G, and perhaps even those low-power technologies like Z-Wave and ZigBee will finally come good (although I’m not holding my breath!). But as we reach a point when gigabytes of data could be moving to and from devices in the home on a regular basis, Wi-Fi may hit its capacity limits. Shifting to a powerline-based network or wired backbone may be the only way to keep up with traffic demands.
• Storage and application migration to the cloud. Today’s browser-based applications and social networks already run across multiple devices without ever leaving the cloud, but traditional applications will increasingly do the same — be it Office 365, photo-editing packages, or gaming via OnLive or Gaikai. The advantages of online version control, storage, subscription models, and easy sharing make the locally installed software package look increasingly redundant, while the lack of optical drives in devices like Ultrabooks or tablets makes installation from disk very tricky. Online storage is already going this way as Dropbox, SkyDrive, iCloud, and Google Drive compete for consumer attention.

Even without these specific areas of focus, there is still mileage in the concept of greater inter-operability between devices and services – maybe Microsoft Research is on to something with its HomeOS, but this would take many years to achieve a critical mass.