New CONNECTIONS 2011 US Gold Sponsor- Affinegy

CONNECTIONS U.S is proud to welcome Affinegy as a 2011 event sponsor.

Affinegy provides advanced software that makes it simple and secure for consumers to lead a Digital Lifestyle. Our Digital Lifestyle Networking platform allows broadband service and solution providers to deliver a frustration-free experience to their end customers. That dramatically reduces support costs, reduces churn, and increases value-added service revenue opportunities.

Their unique solutions have been architected from the ground up to easily connect, secure and manage Digital Lifestyle Networks. Spanning – for the first time – both emerging devices and previously installed, networking gear in the consumer home. This capability gives end consumers unprecedented control of their Digital Lifestyle environment, and provides our customers and partners with powerful intelligence for tailoring value-added services to consumer needs.

With over 5 million consumer Digital Lifestyle Networks deployed via relationships with some of the world’s largest broadband service providers, the reach of our solutions is rapidly growing, and continues to accelerate via our emerging customer channels across the Digital Lifestyle ecosystem.

For more information, please visit http://affinegy.com.

Affinegy Sponsors CONNECTIONS 2011

Parks Associates is proud to announce that Affinegy as a Gold 2011 CONNECTIONS Sponsor.

Affinegy provides software solutions that enable seamless connectivity between consumers, their devices and their content, whether inside or outside the home. Leading service providers, consumer equipment vendors, and ISVs offer Affinegy solutions to their customers as the control point for their connected home experience. Deployed in nearly 5 million households, Affinegy solutions increase product and service adoption, slash inbound support costs, and provide an open architecture for delivering new value-added services for the consumer digital lifestyle.

Thank you Affinegy for your continued support of our events!

For more information about Affinegy and their seamless solutions for your digital lifestyle, please visit www.affinegy.com.

Peak8 Solutions Announced as CONNECTIONS™ Diamond Sponsor

Parks Associates and CEO welcome Peak8 Solutions as a Diamond Sponsor for CONNECTIONS™: The Digital Living Conference and Showcase.

Peak8 Partners, LLC, doing business as Peak8 Solutions is a software and services company that supports the digital lifestyle. Peak8 offers a comprehensive solution suite designed to improve the productivity and effectiveness of technical support call centers. Peak8 also offers consumer friendly software that improves the stability and performance of digital lifestyle products while empowering users with an intelligent self-service capability.

CONNECTIONS™: The Digital Living Conference and Showcase will be held June 24th - 26th in Santa Clara, CA. This premier executive event focuses on market developments and growth factors for advanced digital lifestyle solutions.

CONNECTIONS™ Europe Sessions - Day 2

Wednesday 5 December
0845-0905
Opening Comments and Welcome
The Consumer Across All Four Pillars

Technological advances are key to driving the digital lifestyle markets forward, but is consumer demand keeping pace with innovation? Parks Associates opens Day 2 with insight and analysis of the global consumer across our four Digital Home Pillars. This presentation includes data from Parks Associates’ groundbreaking worldwide research Global Digital Living I and II.

Speakers:
John Barrett, Director of Research, Parks Associates
Stuart Sikes, President, Parks Associates

CONNECTIONS™ Europe Agenda

CONNECTIONS EUROPE: Strategies for Digital Living Markets

CONNECTIONS™ Europe will host 220-250 managers, strategists, and executives marketing digital products and services in Europe. http://www.connectionseurope.com/

Key Topics Addressed:

• Key trends for European/Global digital lifestyles markets
• Interactive sessions with Parks Associates' analysts
• Controls and health management
• The hyper-competitive European telecom environment
• The evolution of IPTV services
• The “next big thing” in European TV
• Service providers: competing on service and innovation
• Value-added services and features
• Fixed/mobile, home network, and multimedia features
• Digital entertainment: downloads, social media, Web 2.0
• Connectivity beyond application-specific platforms
• Communications and entertainment

Connection Research Announces Cooperation with Parks Associates

US-based market research firm Connection Research and Parks Associates today announced a cooperative agreement where Connection Research will sell Parks Associates’ research reports and studies in Australia.

Connection Research will be a reseller of all of Parks Associates’ products and services, including the full range of the company’s digital lifestyles, digital media habits, digital health and electronic gaming reports. The two companies have also agreed to cooperate on research activities and provide assistance to each other in developing cross-regional products.

For more information on Connection Research, please visit http://www.connectionresearch.com.au

Opening Keynote — The Digital Lifestyle: Under Construction

Summary information from Day 2: CONNECTIONS™ May 2007, hosted in Santa Clara, CA.

Opening Keynote — The Digital Lifestyle: Under Construction
Presented by: Greg Jones, General Manager, DSP Systems Strategic Marketing, Texas Instruments

Beyond the four walls of the digital home is a huge opportunity for delivering content anywhere, anytime – the ultimate Digital Lifestyle. Explore how consumers, service providers, and technology enablers will work together to deliver the vision of the emerging digital lifestyle that is being fueled by new advances in digital signal processing.

Texas Instruments’ portfolio of digital signal processing (DSP) and analog technology solutions represents a broad spectrum of digital lifestyle categories, including communications, digital entertainment, networking, and telemetry applications. Greg Jones, who serves as the general manager for DSP Systems Strategic Marketing, highlighted the importance of the DSP in building a wider array of needed consumer solutions, noting that DSP enables many of the services important to the digital lifestyle, including DSL.

Jones sees a larger role for DSPs in the future across a wide array of emerging consumer applications. Digital entertainment is obviously going to be a significant area as digital signal processing will be necessary in managing bandwidth use and encoding and decoding the many different video codecs and formats. Jones said that there may be upwards of 30-40 different codecs to manage.

In addition, Jones brought up examples beyond entertainment where signal processing will play a role in improving learning and communications (instant translations during phone calls) and transportation (the nearly automated automobile). He also mentioned digital healthcare applications as an opportunity for TI to expand its role. Finally, he discussed how DSP technologies will help service providers offer a higher quality of services by measuring and monitoring traffic and applications with PIQUA solutions.

Opening Comments

Summary information from Day 2: CONNECTIONS™ May 2007, hosted in Santa Clara, CA.

Opening Comments
Presented by: Kurt Scherf, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Parks Associates

Summary of this session:
Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst for Parks Associates, began Day 2 with an overview of Parks Associates’ latest research across a number of digital lifestyles product and service categories. Scherf reminded the audience of a key point made at the CONNECTIONS™ 2006 conference – that industry consolidation in broadband and access spaces was indicative of the importance of facilities-based service providers in deploying many of tomorrow’s consumer technology offerings. Further, this consolidation is evidence that service providers and their equipment vendors are working to establish seamless end-to-end links between their services and their customers in order to provide a rich array of bundled services offerings and to further strengthen the bond between carrier and customer.

He provided examples of the major consolidation in the past year, just in the broadband and access areas. As examples, he noted Motorola’s acquisition of Broadbus, Cisco’s purchase of WebEx and Ashley Laurent, Ericsson buying Tandberg and Redback, the Alcatel-Lucent merger, and NDS acquiring Jungo.

With this major consolidation in place, a key focus for the next year will be the deployment of actual consumer products and services across the digital lifestyles value chain, including such categories as Data & Voice, Multimedia/Entertainment, Home & Lifestyle Management, and Value-added Services.

Already carriers in the broadband and television services areas are expanding their portfolios of offerings. Competition between and among providers is a key driver for companies desiring to strengthen their services. Residential broadband penetration will exceed 50% of U.S. households this year, and broadband and television service providers will focus on three key tenets as they market their services – Cost, Convenience, and Convergence.

A new area for growth will certainly be in the “Web 2.0” or social networking/media spaces, Scherf said. Parks Associates conducted a significant study in 2006 – Digital Media Habits – that explored consumers and their habits as they relate to self-created and social media. There are definite areas of interest and potential, particularly in how younger consumers are expressing themselves through Web sites and via content sharing. However, there are many questions about how (or if at all) social and community networking will be a significant revenue-generating business.

Home networking has reached new heights, Scherf said, and there is a renewed focus on multimedia and entertainment networks, particularly now that Apple has entered the fray with its own media receiver. Also significant is the involvement of the service provider community in pushing not only data and voice networking platforms but also entertainment (multiroom DVR) solutions. 2007 and 2008 will be significant years for the reintroduction of media adapter devices and for a renewed focus on consumer storage that places as much emphasis on content sharing as it does on safe and secure backup and safekeeping of digital media. In total, Parks Associates expects more than 900 million devices to be deployed in home networks by the end of 2011.

Home and lifestyle management trends indicate some interesting growth opportunities. Remote management solutions – including Web cameras and two-way access – will continue to see growth in the next few years, and the service provider community will be key to deploying more of these to consumers. This sector will also benefit from the current popularity of advanced entertainment solutions because both high-end home theater and multiroom audio could provide a good framework for higher growth of home controls. Health management is also an interesting area of growth. Parks Associates is projecting a $2.1 billion market for enhanced remote and home healthcare applications under four main areas – Acute Care Monitoring, Wellness Monitoring, Geriatric Monitoring, and E-health Services.

Finally, Parks Associates is continuing to watch the development of digital home support and service offerings. This sector, with the promise of reducing the complexity of consumer technologies such as home networking, broadband, and digital devices, abounds with opportunities. Parks Associates has outlined nine major areas where different players could enter and succeed in enhanced customer support – everything from enhanced security and automated fixes to professional technical support and the role of “digital home advisor” services.

Applications & Content for the Digital Lifestyle

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

As digital media distribution evolves, business models must evolve to account for convergence between pure consumer-paid services and those supported by advertising revenues. This panel includes industry luminaries on the cutting edge of new media who will discuss its impact on the digital lifestyle.

Brad Davis, Vice President, Advertising Sales, Disney Online, Walt Disney Internet Group
Christine Heckart, General Manager, Microsoft TV, Microsoft Corp.
Yoav Tzruya, COO, Exent Technologies
Moderator: Stuart Sikes, President, Parks Associates

This panel took up the debate surrounding Sokola’s contention that current TV advertising dollars are wasteful and inefficient. The panelists agreed that today’s television advertising is not very good at being targeted and measured. Brad Davis acknowledged that Google’s purchase of DoubleClick keeps him up at night since it gives Google a leg up in display ads. Whether gaming or IPTV services would be the savior of advertising was certainly debatable during the panel. Yoav Tzruya is certainly optimistic, but it’s not a panacea. Christine Heckart acknowledged that the IP properties of IPTV make it a compelling application for targeted and measurable advertising but the footprint of IPTV subscribers is currently so small that advertisers aren’t ready to make the move yet.

More than anything, the panel laid out questions in need of answers. For example, Heckart indicated that most implementations of next-gen advertising are a “science experiment” and some determinations need to be made as to who will be responsible for measuring and reporting advertising results. Will it be today’s well-known companies such as Nielsen, or will it be other parties? In the end, one looming question that the industry needs to answer, according to all of the panelists, is how does money flow from a small core of beneficiaries (content owners) to other players?

Introduction to CONNECTIONS™: Digital Lifestyle Developments

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

The pace of digital lifestyle developments continues unabated. A great deal of activity has occurred in the since CONNECTIONS™ 2006. The Parks Associates’ analyst team has compiled this list of the top trends in the last year:

• Broadband penetration in the U.S. will surpass 50% of residences in the middle of 2007. On a global basis, broadband penetration is approaching the 300 million household mark.
• The two large U.S. telcos – AT&T and Verizon – officially entered the IPTV space in 2006, accounting for more than 200,000 subscribers in the first full year of availability. On a global basis, Europe surpassed Asia in terms of overall subscribers, and there is much more activity in Europe in terms of cross-border competition among different telecommunications providers. At the end of 2006, the total number of IPTV subscribers worldwide was slightly more than four million.
• Entertainment content disruption accelerated with News Corp. buying MySpace and Google buying YouTube – leading to the “NewTube.”
• The launch of all the three new game consoles (Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation3, and the Nintendo Wii) was significant. The Xbox 360 and its associated content services are now positioned – according to Microsoft – as second only behind Apple for video downloads.
• Agreement on the underlying protocols that make up the next Wi-Fi standard – 802.11n – was reached. We’re already seeing high volume shipments of Draft-N products, and wireless is aiming at the entertainment and multimedia space.
• Apple announced a month ago that they had sold 100 million iPods (plus two billion music downloads as of year-end 2006), a testament to consumers’ desire for more accessible and easy-to-use media services and products. In addition, the company released AppleTV, where PCs and CE seamlessly interoperate to enhance entertainment applications, and this move should be a significant boost to the growth of multimedia networks.
• Microsoft officially launched the Vista operating system, which places a new level of media creation and consumption capabilities in front of end users.
• Virtual economies are booming — World of Warcraft has nine million subscribers, and Second Life has more than five million users. With this growth, the online gaming community is becoming more entwined with unique social and commerce applications.
• Digital rights management (DRM) issues continue to ebb and flow:

- High-end media server company Kaleidescape was found to be within compliance of the DVD Copy Control Association's license to the Content Scramble System, the method used to encrypt video and audio data on DVDs. Speculation is that this may open the door to “managed copy,” where the studios agree that consumers can take their owned DVDs and make a copy on a server for safekeeping.

- On another positive front, Dan Glickman, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), recently affirmed the studios’ blessing on “authorized copies of the content they [consumers] purchase.”

- Steve Jobs at Apple recently discussed the abolition of rights management for digital music. After all, he argues, fewer than 2 billion songs were sold under DRM with digital music services (such as iTunes); at the same time, the music industry sold 20 billion unprotected songs on CDs.

- Legal challenges persisted to dampen any positive DRM news. A federal judge recently blocked Cablevision from continuing its RS-DVR service, which basically put time-shifting capabilities in the head-end. We view Europe and Asia as much more significant markets for “nDVR” applications. And music publishers are suing XM Satellite for allowing subscribers to copy broadcasts to MP3 players.

• Companies in home controls continued to consolidate, with Nortek acquiring LiteTouch and Gefen and Legrand acquiring Vantage and UStec. Best Buy released its Home System in a Box, called ConnectedLife.Home. BT and Bell Canada marked the entry of telcos into the home security space.
• Retailers, service providers, and third-party entities are discovering there are significant business opportunities in digital home tech and customer support services. Revenues from Best Buy’s Geek Squad services (including product installation, configuration, troubleshooting, and repair) exceed $1 billion in U.S., and other major big box retailers have either launched or rebranded their own digital home technology service offerings. Circuit City launched its firedogSM service in September 2006, and OfficeMax® just launched ctrlcenter™ for remote tech support in April 2007. Both CompUSA and Staples rebranded their tech support services to TechPro and EasyTech, respectively.

Finally, Stuart Sikes, president of Parks Associates, said the industry is moving forward because big players are spending big money to build out the digital home.