Where is the real entrance of smart home, do you know it?

Guide: New applications that meet strong needs are the weapons that break the current chicken-and-egg dilemma in smart homes.

And the carrier of this new application must still be the large home appliances that have been the protagonists in the old era.

The products in the wave of smart home reflect that various manufacturers or entrepreneur are practicing their understanding of an ancient concept, and use various reliable or unreliable products to tell the specious story. Among the different versions of these stories, the most exciting is the passage that becomes the entrance to the smart home.After all, the PC era is a browser, the mobile phone era is WeChat, and the king of smart home has not yet appeared, and anyone can say that they have the potential to be crowned. All kinds of smart routers, smart sockets, smart security lenses and even speakers have jumped out and declared that they are indispensable high-frequency products for users, and will be the center of information collection in the future.However, even if these small home appliances are indeed necessary for some users in their daily life, they should also stay quietly in their own corner without further interaction with users. A measure of how well they do their job is whether they can perform more functions with fewer user instructions; furthermore, the information they actively collect should also be the minimum amount, just for their own sake. Inner things, no additional costs. Sensors are much more expensive than the actual units that perform the function, an extremely ridiculous status quo common to small smart appliances.

As mentioned in Tencent's report, in the final analysis, new applications that meet strong needs are the weapons that break the current dilemma of the smart home with the chicken or the egg. And the carrier of this new application must still be the large-scale home appliances that have been the protagonists in the old era. Only then can they be able to integrate sufficient sensing and interaction into a single product under the condition of suitable cost performance, breaking the game.

This major appliance, in the minds of most consumers, specifically refers to the TV. Whether it is a humble room or a mansion, it is rare to have no TV in the living room. Although other white goods such as refrigerators and air conditioners are also frequently used and indispensable by people, their core function is to reduce people's physical labor.

As the former king of the living room, the TV now feels like the crown is dusty. Past success has bred extremely powerful vested interest groups and established thinking, making it difficult for substantive new applications to be promoted on this big screen in the living room.

Satisfying users' desire for new uses for their TVs can lead to success. The first obvious example here is the Chromecast. As a very cheap TV accessory, Chromecast has successfully expanded a new application of TV. The function of this application is very simple but also very novel, that is, it can conveniently project the audio and video streams of mobile phones and tablets to the big screen for easy viewing or sharing.

In contrast, Google TV in the past and Android TV without the Chromecast function cannot expand new application scenarios for TV, they just integrate the chains of old applications. People have been using TV to watch video content, whether it is live or recorded; people have also been using TV to play games. In fact, the history of video game consoles is older and more orthodox than personal computers. Without Atari, Jobs did not know where to start. Where to start; and when it comes to entertainment on TV, if you don't change the mode of interaction, you can't play any new tricks.

But Chromecast is not enough, because it is a one-way function. It just condescends the large TV screen to serve the small screen in the multi-screen interactive scene, and the interaction and communication functions on the TV are lost. From browsers to WeChat, whether they are called killer applications or portals, their main function is to serve as the main interaction interface for communication. The current TV applications have not made efforts in this direction, lacking Products with imaginative and practical value.Of course, this new app won't be a whole new construct created out of thin air. The real value in this wave of smart hardware is actually those that have civilianized products in the industrial and commercial fields, such as Dropcam, etc. are security systems entering the home; drones and motion sensor sensors are entering the hands of ordinary consumers from the field of film and television production. In the interactive and communication part of TV, it may also be a natural extension to move the existing high-end video conferencing solutions into the home. But this kind of new application for the family, even if it is launched on the market, it must not be the old form, and it must not be created by the old manufacturers.

As early as the end of 2013, surveys showed that the proportion of American teenagers watching YouTube during prime time was higher than that of traditional TV. In the future, the growing generation will definitely not watch TV, but they will definitely use it, because no one will resist the existence of a big screen.

Finally, there is no surprise but very solid data in the survey in the report of Tencent Home Appliances. In the survey, the question of "if you can only choose one smart home, where do you want it most", the living room ranked first. bit, accounting for 40.84%. The battlefield of smart home has always been in the living room, and the commanding height is the TV screen in the middle.

The entrance is there, and there is only one path to the top of Mount Hua since ancient times. The question is who can climb to the top with what application.