Opening Keynote — Media Mobility and the Connected Home

Summary information from Day 1: CONNECTIONS™ May 2007, hosted in Santa Clara, CA.

Opening Keynote — Media Mobility and the Connected Home
Presented by: Ray Sokola, Chief Technology Officer and Corporate Vice President, Motorola, Inc.

More than ever, consumers expect providers to offer seamless, on-demand access to a wide array of personal and professionally created media. The next-generation of technology for the Connected Home will not only enable this access, but expand the consumer's choice and offer more individual personalization than ever before. With these new technology platforms come new and emerging business models: content mobility, on-demand ad insertion, push-to-consumer technologies, mobile advertising and more. In his presentation, Mr. Sokola spoke about the technology innovations that enable the Connected Home environment and discussed how these technologies open the door to new revenue streams for service providers.

In his CONNECTIONS™ keynote, Ray Sokola discussed the underlying trends that allow a product to be “mobility-enabled.” A key starting point is the rise of very affordable storage, both for local (the in-home DVR) and network-based applications (such as video-on-demand with DRAM-based VOD servers). Take every single conversation that a person has during his or her lifetime, for example. They could all be stored on a terabyte (and it could be accomplished rather cost-effectively).

The consumer is going to benefit from the evolution of the set-top box (STB), Sokola noted. First, the STB was all about controlling the channel. It then evolved to a platform to control the time and place of viewing (with DVRs and whole-house DVRs). The third stage will be user-motivated control of programming and content, which leads to interesting applications, such as Motorola’s Follow Me TV™, where time-shifted programming can flow from room to room using home networking.

Finally, Sokola discussed the evolution of advertising, where $70 billion was spent last year just on television ads. Sokola wondered aloud whether this was an inefficient use of ad dollars and if there are ways to make it more meaningful – “repartitioning” it, as he put it. Two new models that may come to fruition are location-based and personalized-driven advertising.