Hello, and welcome to Protocol Entertainment, your guide to the game and media industry. This Thursday we take a closer look at the new Matter standard and its impact on entertainment gadgets. Plus: Amazon stops Glow and ILM celebrates StageCraft.
Simpler smart homes can make TVs more powerful
This week, the smart home industry reached a major milestone with the release of the Matter standard, which promises to simplify the installation and use of compatible smart home devices. Essentially, Matter aims to provide some basic interoperability to devices like light bulbs, smart switches, and thermostats.
Matter is introduced by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, which includes Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung. The primary focus is on simplifying smart home gadgets themselves, but the standard could also affect the kinds of devices people use to control and monitor their smart homes. That, in turn, can have a significant impact on TVs and other entertainment devices.
First, everything will become a lot easier. Setting up a smart home can be tricky. Troubleshooting when things break is even more frustrating. Matter wants to help with many of those issues, as Anish Kattukaran, product manager of the Google Home Platform group, explained at a recent media briefing.
- Kattukaran fully acknowledged that smart home technology is not where it should be. “It’s hard to set up devices [and] link them to your favorite apps and platforms,” he said.
- In addition, the technology can often feel like a step in the wrong direction. “These devices don’t always work as reliably as, say, when you walk up to your wall and hit the light switch,” Kattukaran said.
- Matter tries to solve some of those problems, starting with the installation. Certified devices use a QR code to help establish a secure connection for installation.
- Google plans to further simplify setup by deeply integrating Matter into Android, with Kattukaran promising that setting up a smart home device will be as easy as quickly pairing Bluetooth headphones with your smartphone.
- The standard also promises greater reliability by allowing compatible devices to communicate with each other locally rather than forcing them to send a request to the cloud, then connect to another vendor’s cloud service, and finally return the resulting command. to send to your home.
- That should help hardware makers too, Kattukaran argued. “It’s really hard to build smart home devices,” he said. “Device makers spend this huge amount of time on basic connectivity and less time on actually building great experiences.”
Then things start to get interesting. Google Nest GM Rishi Chandra predicted that the standard will unleash a new wave of innovation by helping vendors “actually build better optimization around your entertainment experience or your security experience.”
- This could include better control over the home. At the moment, each device still comes with its own app. Much of that functionality will increasingly shift to apps and dashboards that merge multiple devices together, including the Google Home app, which the company plans to relaunch soon with a new user interface.
- Chandra also suggested there might be room for laptops, tablets and other devices when it comes to smart home control. “These are devices that are important in the home today, but we’ve separated them from each other,” he said. “We didn’t put them in the loop.”
- One of the big winners of Matter could be entertainment devices. For example, smart speakers and displays are increasingly being used as smart home hubs, and Google promises to roll out such functionality to its Nest devices soon.
- There is also a lot of potential for turning smart TVs and displays into dashboards for the home – something that never really worked in the past due to interoperability issues.
Ultimately, Matter could make it easier to build and share smart home routines, which could also benefit the entertainment industry. Imagine Netflix sharing presets that change your light depending on the show you’re watching, or Spotify using sensors in your home to fine-tune your multi-room audio experience.
“There have been some transformative moments that unlocked new innovation in the smart home space,” Chandra said. “We are about to enter a new phase.”
— Janko Roettgers
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It’s back to square one for Amazon’s projection efforts
Amazon has pulled the plug on Glow, a children’s video calling device that used a projector to expand the play space beyond the screen. The decision to discontinue the device was in response to poor sales, as well as a general shift in consumer behavior, Bloomberg said.
- What was interesting about Glow was the combination of computer vision and projection mapping, which allowed children to play with physical puzzle pieces or ‘scan’ physical objects to incorporate them into digital art.
- The device was the result of a lot of experimentation, with Amazon developers playing with ideas like robotic arms and laser pointers, as Martin Aalund, Amazon’s senior hardware engineer, told me earlier this year.
The Glow team wanted to reinvent video chatting for children with grandparents and other caregivers, based on the observation that traditional Zoom conversations simply didn’t work for many children.
- “Kids are terrible cameramen,” Behrang Assadi, who led Amazon Glow’s marketing, told me at the time. “They tend not to sit still. They get easily distracted by other phone features, and sometimes they just put it down and walk away.”
- The device did its best to reinvent that experience, but the focus on video chats also limited its usefulness. In addition, grandparents are probably not the easiest target audience for new and experimental technology.
- Aalund told me earlier this year that he had already been approached by colleagues who wanted to use the technology for other purposes.
- “People in the company asked us about our hardware and software stack for all kinds of different things,” he said. “From office environments to video conferencing, where this could be a great whiteboard, to tutoring. All different things.”
Amazon has explored the use of projection mapping for glasses-less AR in the past; I wouldn’t be surprised if the company starts integrating some Glow-like technology into other devices in the future.
— Janko Roettgers
In other news
Within Amazon’s free video strategy. Prime Video has long been at the heart of Amazon’s streaming efforts. So why did the company build a separate service called Freevee?
The launch of the Overwatch sequel is falling flat. Blizzard’s first major console and PC game since the release of the original Overwatch in 2016 had a disastrous launch on Tuesday, in part due to two separate DDoS attacks.
Netflix wanted to make “Lord of the Rings” the next MCU. Tolkien’s heirs were so shocked by the idea that they accepted a lower offer from Amazon, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Cyberpunk developers announce an ambitious release list. CD Projekt Red said on Tuesday that it has seven new games in the works in its Cyberpunk and Witcher franchises to be developed at numerous studios in Europe and North America.
NBCUniversal’s plans for a streaming bundle have gone nowhere. TThe Comcast subsidiary has approached competitors about reselling their services through a cable-like bundle, but HBO Max and Paramount+ have turned down the offer, CNBC reports.
Sony is looking at TV and film projects from the creator of Elden Ring. Sony’s investment in FromSoftware could bring “opportunities” with PlayStation Productions’ newly formed media arm, PlayStation Studios chief Herman Hulst told Reuters this week.
Wells Fargo analyst predicts cord cutting will accelerate. Pay TV providers will only have 40 million subscribers in ten years, according to media analyst Steven Cahall of Wells Fargo.
TikTok wants to bring live shopping to the US ByteDance reportedly plans to bring live shopping to the North American public in time for the holidays.
Light & Magic
I’ve written quite a bit about virtual production technologies, including LED walls and the way they are changing how and where movies and TV shows are made. But sometimes you just have to see it to believe it – and luckily this week Industrial Light & Magic gave us a peek behind the curtain of its virtual production technology StageCraft, showing us how actors react. In the words of O’Shea Jackson Jr., “This is crazy!”
— Janko Roettgers
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Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to entertainment@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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