Home Cinema as a Service?
In a world where ‘Software as a Service’ is becoming ubiquitous, could a monthly subscription get you great hardware as well as the latest movies and music?
Owning things is taking on a whole new meaning these days. Many people don’t own a music or movie collection any more. With services like Pandora, Spotify, Netflix and others you can listen to or watch nearly anything you might want for less than the cost of a CD (or an album download or two) a month.
So if you don’t actually ‘own’ the media you consume, why should you own the equipment you watch and listen with? This may sound bizarre, but like plenty of new developments we shall find that the future is not only already here, but in many ways, we’ve been there before.
The easiest example for the ‘as-a service’ idea right now may be to consider the concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This arrangement is being pushed hard by leading software providers like Adobe (with Photoshop and more), Autodesk and Microsoft, all making it increasingly difficult to actually buy a software licence. Instead, you pay by the month or the year, and your subscription covers all the upgrades and new versions as they are released.
Many businesses are reserving their capital and avoiding ‘ownership’ of as much as they can. Some airlines, for example, don’t actually own any aircraft. Aircraft leasing, whether a ‘wet lease’ (with flight crew and maintenance included) or dry lease (the aircraft only), is big business and for sound reasons on both sides of the agreement.
Our brothers in commercial AV are already far advanced down this path, which sees large corporations and educational institutions paying a monthly fee per meeting room, classroom or auditorium instead of buying equipment outright. Effectively, they are leasing the equipment and the installation over a certain term.
Now, however, commercial audiovisual providers are looking to take this concept much further. Instead of simply ‘paying off ’ an initial fixed investment, providers want their customers to think even longer-term and pay a monthly fee that covers not a specific set of equipment — like a projector and a control system — but instead covers a set of service conditions. These might include a guarantee that the equipment will be available, say, 99.5% of the time, and that should something fail it will be remedied next business day, or such like.
Commercially, ‘AV-as-a-service’ (AVaaS) is set to go one step further, imagining that your monthly fee might cover any upgrades that might be needed — as an example,
when DisplayPort starts to supplant HDMI as the standard output for many personal computers. In that case, your monthly subscription might cover periodic upgrades to your meeting room or classroom systems to give them new capabilities as computer technology evolves. The clever part is that the customer should not even need to know that such upgrades are needed — the AVaaS provider makes the upgrade happen in the course of their regular maintenance — without the need to request new equipment. Automatic upgrades If we translate this to the home cinema market, we could imagine your monthly fees for Home Cinema-as-aService (HCaaS — but we’ll call it HTaaS to cater to the US preference for ‘home theatre’) covering, say an upgrade to your projector, AV receiver and source equipment that gives you 4K capabilities, with High Dynamic Range or Deep Colour capabilities as each of these innovations reach the market. And all this (in the ultimate ‘HTaaS’ arrangement) might well be tied in to your content provider as well. As Netflix, Foxtel, Tidal or whoever release UHD or perhaps High Bitrate Audio, you may find hardware and software updates arriving at your door during your regularly scheduled service calls.
But could this really happen in a domestic setting? Are people really prepared to rent rather than buy cherished entertainment technology? Well of course, the answer is yes — they’ve been doing it for years! Your correspondent had his first paying job in the audio-visual industry back in 1974 with Radio Rentals, which made its name helping people afford the latest in entertainment technology by renting rather than buying. They started back in 1930 in Britain literally renting radio sets, but business really took off in Australia around the dawn of the colour television era when they rented colour TVs and, later, VCRs. Certainly, with the continual drop (in real dollar terms) of the cost of TVs, and our throw-away culture that tends to replace rather than repair technology if it breaks down, that market has seen a significant decline. Indeed, the value of such ‘rental’ terms has recently come into the spotlight following the launch of a class action over elements of some agreements.
Apart from demonstrating that consumers are indeed willing to consider options other than purchase of their technology, those offerings of ‘single item technology’ rentals are not really comparable with the direction that AVaaS is heading. Big international companies including Harman are looking to develop a much tighter integration with their customers.
Commercially, it is happening already in a huge way. Major companies and some of Australia’s largest Universities are issuing tenders for AVaaS arrangements that cover the whole of their AV requirements — literally hundreds of systems, with thousands of pieces of equipment. As part of these arrangements, meeting room and classroom systems would be monitored continuously online via their control systems with constant checks of key performance statistics so that corrective action (and service calls, if needed) can be scheduled before a catastrophic failure.
But clearly, there is scope for HTaaS providers to monitor much more than heatsink temperatures at the output of customer’s home cinema systems. By monitoring the types of content customers prefer, fans of action movies, for example, might be offered upgrades to bigger subwoofer systems or even gaming systems. Others, with more epicurean or classical tastes, might be tempted with high bit-rate players or even up-market turntables as an adjunct to their package.
Taking on HTaaS has other potential benefits as well. Those who invested heavily in 3D technology just a few years ago are now finding that the comparative dearth of quality 3D content has meant that their investments are no longer paying off the way that they expected. With the right HTaaS contract, it might just be easier to transition from 3D gear to, say, a system with Dolby Atmos sound or displays that are 4K and HDR capable. Not coincidentally, the potential for renters to ‘insure themselves’ against the risk of obsolescence was one reason that colour TV and VCR rentals took off in the 1970s and 1980s. I am tempted to point out that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So perhaps the conditions are now right for an evolution in the way we consume audio and video hardware in the same way as we are eschewing a CD and Blu-ray collection for Tidal and Netflix monthly subscriptions. Very creative financing options have seen the big boys in commercial AV able to offer the best and most esoteric commercial options for a single monthly fee. So, there seems no reason why your future system shouldn’t come by way of a monthly HTaaS payment with guaranteed serviceability and simple upgrade options, rather than a five or six figure “hope for the best” (would that be HftB?) investment.
Perhaps the conditions are now right for an evolution in the way we consume audio and video hardware in the same way as we are eschewing a CD and Blu-ray collection for Tidal and Netflix monthly subscriptions....”