Interop: the future of hardware

The recent suc­cess of Air­play has given the main­stream pub­lic a glimpse at the future: gen­er­ally dumb devices that can receive infor­ma­tion from smarter ones.

Elec­tronic Con­sumer Hardware

If you have a stereo or a set of speak­ers in your house, you’re deal­ing with tech­nol­ogy that hasn’t really changed that much in almost a cen­tury. In the same way, TV sets have seen lit­tle evo­lu­tion in the way of being smart over the last 50 years: when you think about it, the biggest steps in TV have moved from black & while to color (in the 70s), cath­ode ray tube to plasma and LCD (late 90s), and ana­log to dig­i­tal (early 2000s). In each case, the focus has been on the pic­ture and not so much on the logic to receive and dis­play information.

While new mod­els of tele­vi­sion of radio are intro­duced on a yearly basis, the fun­da­men­tals behind them are essen­tially the same and the fea­tures that are intro­duced are, for the most part, mar­ginal improvements.

How­ever, over the last 4–5 years, a quiet rev­o­lu­tion has been under­way in the hard­ware busi­ness with the addi­tion of two appar­ently innocu­ous com­po­nents mak­ing their way through into a lot of the more recent ver­sion of new devices: USB dri­ves and inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity (either wired or wire­less). This has made it pos­si­ble for the core soft­ware com­po­nents of those devices to be upgraded, either by down­load­ing the upgrade on a USB drive and plug­ging it into the con­sumer device or auto­mat­i­cally in the back­ground via the inter­net, open­ing a whole new world of possibilities.

The remote experience

A radio sta­tion in the 1920s used a knob to find the right sig­nal and today it’s a but­ton. The clar­ity improved by mov­ing from AM to FM and HD radio but the user expe­ri­ence is basi­cally the same. For TV, the expe­ri­ence has moved from hav­ing to turn a knob on the TV screen to turn­ing a knob on a device that was con­nected via a cable to the TV to press­ing a but­ton on a wire­less remote con­trol. The inter­face has not changed much, except for adding more but­tons to allow access to more complexity.

Mean­while, an increas­ing amount of touch­screen devices are start­ing to pop­u­late home, whether they are mobile phones or tablets and there is now a slew of soft­ware that allows for oper­at­ing some of the more com­plex tech­nolo­gies out there. Using sim­ple infrared adap­tors, those devices are now allowed to share their own smarts with TV sets and radios, push­ing the cre­ation of sim­pler and more adapt­able inter­faces for remote con­trols to increas­ingly becom­ing soft­ware based solu­tions. As soft­ware evolves, it can be upgraded eas­ily and include new func­tion­al­ity with­out get­ting rid of the devices that con­sume it.

Hard­ware is a platform

In this instance, we are see­ing soft­ware trump­ing hard­ware. Short of the depen­dence on cer­tain phys­i­cal com­po­nents being natively included in hard­ware devices (for exam­ple, the abil­ity to sup­port cer­tain forms of com­mu­ni­ca­tions like infrared or short range radio), the hard­ware does not really need to get upgraded unless its pri­mary func­tion (eg. show­ing a pic­ture or play­ing some sounds) is itself in need of an upgrade. And one could see a time when the receiv­ing hard­ware would receive soft­ware upgrades that allow for this inter­op­er­abil­ity to be a smoother expe­ri­ence because hard­ware is a plat­form.

A group of tech­nolo­gies around inter­op­er­abil­ity have made it eas­ier for this phe­nom­e­non to hap­pen. While few peo­ple care about such stan­dards at HTML5, HTTP, TCP/IP, WiFi, and DLNA, they can serve as the build­ing block of the future.

Imag­ine a tele­vi­sion, for exam­ple, where every chan­nel would be served through an inter­nal web server that ren­dered every­thing on the screen via a web page with an HTML5 embed­ded video player. All of a sud­den, the TV screen would become a giant web browser in full screen mode, allow­ing to not only access any con­tent on cable or broad­cast TV but also any con­tent avail­able on the internet.

Add a layer that would allow for throw­ing HTML5 applets on top of that screen and you would have a stan­dard com­pli­ant approach to devel­op­ing things for tele­vi­sion. Throw a webGL inter­preter in there and you have some­thing that is dras­ti­cally more advanced than what any TV in 2011 can cur­rently do. Now make this layer address­able as a web ser­vice stan­dard and you could not only see other com­pa­nies incor­po­rate it but also see an explo­sion of sup­port from the devel­op­ment community.

Stan­dard­iza­tion is they key to TV’s future

Today, devel­op­ing for tele­vi­sion (or send stream­ing audio to a stereo) is an often frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence, forc­ing devel­op­ers to encode con­tent so that it meets the require­ment that each TV or set-top box man­u­fac­turer has set for­ward. This often com­pli­cated land­scape has left most devel­op­ers avoid­ing it because the return on invest­ing in a sin­gle plat­form just isn’t there. A way to bat­tle this is through stan­dard­iza­tion of the under­ly­ing inter­faces. Since the 1990s many peo­ple, myself included, have pushed for a stan­dard lan­guage to merge tele­vi­sion and the web.

These efforts need the sup­port of TV man­u­fac­tur­ers and the under­stand­ing from said man­u­fac­tur­ers that open stan­dards will not only lift their indus­try but poten­tially fuel another area of growth for their offer­ings. As more and more appli­ca­tions get devel­oped on top of a stan­dard com­pli­ant deck, there will be increas­ing demands on the part of the devel­op­ers to give access to other parts of the hard­ware, which could be com­pleted via paid soft­ware updates. Hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers would then find them­selves in a world where they could make money on the ini­tial hard­ware they sell but also add extra rev­enue by turn­ing on extra func­tions through soft­ware sales.

Lack of stan­dard­iza­tion cre­ates a winner-takes-all market

Apple has an early lead in the audio mar­ket, with Air­play (and its sup­port from many hard­ware ven­dors). For exam­ple, in our house, we have equipped sev­eral rooms with Air­port Express adap­tors con­nected to pow­ered speak­ers or stereos. Apple had ini­tially locked Air­play to Apple only devices, but an inge­nious com­pany called Rogue Amoeba put out a piece of soft­ware called Air­foil that allows us to play from any source we can find on a com­puter. It would be nice to get such func­tion­al­ity on our mobile phones and tablets but, because Apple is lock­ing up its sys­tem, it is unlikely that such thing could hap­pen unless allowed by Apple.

An open stan­dard that repro­duces such func­tion­al­ity could not only ham­per Apple’s abil­ity to lock peo­ple into its ecosys­tem but could also help pro­lif­er­ate the rise of inex­pen­sive devices that can be addressed from the internet.

In this case, as in the case of TV, we could see a sin­gle closed pro­pri­etary stan­dard emerge and cre­ate an early lock-in for the owner of that stan­dard. How­ever, if there is one les­son the inter­net has taught every­one in the com­put­ing indus­try, it is that open always trumps pro­pri­etary in the long run. Early plat­forms may get early wins, but even­tu­ally, the open stan­dard dis­turbs their mar­ket­place and destroys the pro­pri­etary aspect.

Some peo­ple may con­sider the the receiv­ing devices for new con­tent as dumb devices but I would argue that they would fall in the cat­e­gory of smart devices: after all, isn’t the smartest per­son in a room gen­er­ally the one that first lis­tens and only speaks their mind after receiv­ing appro­pri­ate input. Maybe we should cre­ate a new cat­e­gory, call­ing those wise devices instead of smart ones.