philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

25 Years of Tech: The Growth of Smart Homes and Virtual Reality

Kline: I have four Echos in basically a three-bedroom house. We have Google Home at our little summer home, our vacation home. And I probably own, I don't know, something else along those lines. Basically, I have to be honest, I use Alexa as a weather device, as, primarily, a music player or a podcast device. I haven't hooked it up to my lights. I haven't hooked it up because, frankly, my light switches are right when I walk in the door. It's just as easy to hit the light switch as it is to say, "Alexa, turn my lights on."

Lewis: Yeah. So, that's the struggle. I think, if you're looking at gadget-y type stuff for the future, a great thing to keep in mind is, if this stuff is very expensive for people to adopt, adoption's going to be slow. I think that's one of the struggles that we see with VR right now. That's a space that a lot of people are super interested in, they think it's a really compelling growth story. Well, really full VR rigs are expensive to have in your house. If that cost is being passed along to the end consumer, adoption's going to be pretty slow. If you see devices that are connected home devices and they're on the cheaper side, know that it's probably more likely that that's going to get adopted quicker.

Kline: One thing we haven't touched on is wireless and internet delivery. We're at the dawn of 5G. When we have 5G networks -- which, if the Sprint - T-Mobile merger goes through, they might be the first -- you're going to have the ability to deliver more of a broadband internet experience through phone connectivity. As that spreads around the world, it's going to be very disruptive, pricing is going to come down, and the ability for everyone to take advantage of all of this content, all of these services, it just changes. That's really the investment opportunity, how is internet going to be delivered going forward.

See the full story here: https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/07/03/25-years-of-tech-the-growth-of-smart-homes-and-vir.aspx