In AT&T's Smart Living Room, iPad and TV Are the Same
High up inside a windowless telecom building in New York, AT&T (ATT) showed off some of its most promising lab fodder last week: namely, the company's vision for the "smart" living room.
iPad or TV?
What AT&T was showing off is called "device agnostic content," or video that can stream to your phone, TV or computer -- all via the cloud. During a demo with an AT&T engineer, the prototype system worked incredibly quickly, even with a pretty complex voice search. I spoke a relatively complex query into the iPad's microphone: "all CBS News shows featuring President Obama in the last week." In under a second, the iPad transmitted my voice to the cloud for processing and sent back a number of accurate TV clips. At the bottom, there was a simple toggle for video: iPad or TV. Switching it sent the video quickly to the flat-screen TV in front of us, which was connected to a U-verse set-top box.
The system was rough around the edges -- the iPad app doing the searching was a hacky Web view -- but the hardware and software were all stock pieces, indicating that AT&T is capable of this technology today.
Who Cares about TV on an iPad?
What's crucial about the AT&T setup is that it does not rely on a local home network, or LAN, to work. Both the iPad (with its 3G card) and the TV (with its Internet-connected set-top box) only talked to AT&T's servers, not directly to each other. This is a marked divergence from the predictions of a few years ago, when everyone assumed that devices needed to "handshake" with one another to interact. Now the cloud is serving as the backbone. The upshot: there is zero set-up.
For years consumers have been promised frictionless multimedia experiences on all their electronics, but here, in the waning weeks of 2010, that promise is yet unfulfilled. But technologies like AT&T's are mere steps from the market place, and there is a quiet ground-swell of "connected devices" coming with it.
Other smart devices are coming
Cambridge Consultants, the wireless research and development company that invented Bluetooth, is hard at work building smart medical devices that work just like AT&T's cloud TV. Just this month the company announced a small transmitter called "Minder" (pictured at right) that collects data from other smart medical devices (like this smart inhaler) and transmits it to the cloud using a 3G radio. There, the patient's data can be accessed by physicians or hospitals to measure a patient's compliance, or their reactions to a new course of treatment.
So what do smart TV and smart medical devices have to do with each other? Nothing -- and that's the point. In this "Internet of things," as it has been called, devices sporting their own wireless connections (via cell phone SIM cards) don't have to be "taught" to talk to each other. There is no setup process whereby you add these things to your home WiFi network, or punch in an IP address so they can talk.
Right now, setting up a device (say, a new printer) is not too much of a hassle. But in a house where the printer, TV, computers, dishwasher, HVAC system, lighting and hybrid car are all talking to each other, the cloud becomes a vital mediator. Whether our wireless networks can handle that traffic is another story.
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