The home robotics future many of us have imagined is here, although adoption into the technology has been limited to date. Pricing, availability, and consumer awareness are some of the factors involved, but another overlooked facet is the current disconnect between home robots and smart home technology. While robots in the home have always to some degree been a widely anticipated endeavor, smart home has emerged as a vital complement, and vendors are beginning to see increased value in supporting integration of their products into the smart home ecosystem. This is borne out in the projection of nearly 79 million homes worldwide that will feature a robot inside the home by 2024. 

With worldwide urban populations on the rise year after year, smart cities project developers are searching for ways to create increasingly intelligent, efficient, and sustainable solutions. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been the technological starting block, but as IoT usage and implementation expands its reach across several verticals, increased digitization needed to power smart cities has also brought additional cybersecurity risks to the IoT ecosystem — threatening the momentum of current and future projects. In 2024, three industries — financial, information and communication, and defense — will account for over half of the projected $135 billion total allotted to mitigating cybersecurity within the IoT infrastructure. The remaining 44% is designated to be split among several platforms considered integral to smart city growth:

The collective whisper amongst would-be cord cutters is pervasive — many consumers suggest that paying a monthly premium for channels and content they aren't regularly consuming has heightened the urge to switch to streaming platform services like Apple TV, Netflix, or Hulu. Although your regional cable provider faces a continuously difficult challenge in keeping customers and generating revenue, the pay TV market is not expected to meet its end anytime soon. In fact, its subscriber base is projected to grow at a steady pace to over 1.1 billion in 2024. 

The excitement around small Unmanned Aerial Systems, referred to more commonly as drones, has been in place for well over a decade. Despite a consistent hype cycle around applications in both the commercial and consumer markets, commercial usage has historically trailed behind that of recreational flyers — in 2018, for example, drone consumer market shipments comprised 98% of the overall aggregate. For a number of reasons, we expect a shift to occur over the next decade, with commercial and industrial usage narrowing the gap. 

In June 2019, the new EU Cybersecurity Act quietly came into force. It is effectively a Regulation (2019/881) which means it is applicable verbatim across the Union. The Act confers a permanent mandate to the EU cybersecurity agency ENISA, which sees its remit and budget significantly expanded. ENISA will not only support policy and legal developments, operational cooperation, crisis management, and capacity building in cybersecurity but also coordinated vulnerability disclosures among EU member states. Most interestingly, the agency has been tasked with setting up a cybersecurity certification framework for ICTs.

The last decade and a half has seen a tremendous amount of change in the video market, especially when you consider TVs extended history. The arrival of YouTube in 2005 sparked a revolution in video that both scared the incumbents and excited the masses – this was the “democratization of video” and the power was shifting to the masses. 

The popularity of smart home technology and devices has prompted new developments in how the market is reshaping itself. While over 34 million households worldwide adopted a smart home device for the first time last year, new home growth is starting to give way to the integration of additional technology with the devices consumers already own and use. Popular devices like the Nest and Ring are becoming basic household items, but consumers are now looking for ways to keep the rest of the home connected.

The consumer market for flat panel HD TVs has continuously grown throughout the last decade and a half. Due to larger screen sizes, higher resolution, and increased smart capabilities, flat panel TV adoption has overcome what is generally a saturated market. The demand for the most updated, "must-have" technology in arguably the home's most important device (not to mention those annual Black Friday deals) keeps flat panel TVs flying off the shelves.

While people in large cities and populated urban areas may take connectivity on-the-go for granted, the truth is that for many rural communities, mobile broadband remains painfully out of reach. This lack of mobile access doesn’t just mean people are missing out on their social media updates and phone calls; on the contrary, it remains a significant barrier to job opportunities and upward mobility in general.

Wi-Fi is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and is not expected to slow down anytime soon. Faster, more widespread coverage is on the horizon, which will facilitate growth in mesh networking systems, smart home, automotive, and IoT applications. Over the next five years, device shipments are forecasted to surpass 20 billion, with nearly 25% of those occurring in 2024.