A recent CEA study found that American adults spend an average of $1,200 on their gadgets every year. The top five consumer electronics growth sectors are DVRs, network routers or hubs, MP3 players, cable modems and digital cameras.
My question, and maybe it’s answered in the full report as opposed to the press release, is where are these CE devices coming from? Are consumers buying them in retail or getting them from service providers? The inclusion of cable modems makes me think the latter. Certainly cable modems sell at retail, but a huge number of them go through the operator channel.
As CEA analyst Elena Caudle points out, it’s interesting that two of the top five growth categories are home networking products. And I’d argue that DVRs can serve the same purpose, as seen with Verizon’s Home Media DVR service. (The technology behind the Verizon service is Motorola’s Follow Me TV solution.)
Other categories with significant growth include HDTV and cell phones.
[...] includes Motorola’s own software interface. (The main technology but not the interface underlies Verizon’s Home Media DVR service.) In other words, Motorola does have TV software up its sleeve. Hardware, however, has been the [...]
[...] and then. As we start hanging more and more things off the network (home networking products are a huge growth area), it only makes sense that added devices should handle some of the load and not just act as dummy [...]