In the same way that it has taken years to get the digital camera market off the ground, and took almost as long again for it to begin its shift towards handset cameras, the digital photo frame market is going to take a lot longer that people might have once expected.
The truth is that it has taken almost 15 years for electronic images to become acceptable on the front of PCs, as ‘screen savers’ and home pages, and it is perhaps only the advent of social networks ‘ MySpace and Facebook ‘ that have truly brought acceptability to the digital images that we capture all the time on handsets.
And yet most research companies continue to predict the imminent uptake of digital photoframes just because they know that the digital image could be so much more than the drab, grey, motionless, dust collecting picture frames we use today. However no-one has ever really put together a model of how families, home owners and people at work are using, and might use, digital photos. It seems like a consumer electronics market, and that ‘systems’ thinking should not be required, but in the end the digital photo frame market could be far more complicated than anyone realized.
This week US researcher In-Stat came out with a report which said that the big driver for the digital photo frame market was gift giving and went on to conclude from a survey that people would mostly only buy a digital photo frame as a gift for someone else. That’s a horrible category ‘ good enough to give to someone else, but not value enough to buy for yourself.
And even on that basis, global shipments of digital photo frames would reach 50 million by 2013.
This is a bit like saying that eBook readers will only sell that many, because it means that ‘most’ people won’t bother buying one.
If someone wants to give a digital photoframe to their mother as a gift they have to think about how the photos will get loaded ‘ from the PC via Wi-Fi, from a memory stick, over a wire, from the TV set ‘ so they need to know if they’ve got all or any of those devices. Will it require a plug, or will a battery be needed and will it be re-chargeable, so is a charger required. Think about it, you would only buy bottom of the range, low function digital photo frames as a gift, because all of that uncertainty about what technology your gift receiver owns or can cope with.
Has anyone ever done any research that says how often we look at photos and when we look at photos? We haven’t heard of any, but as we wander about a house looking at all the images, it strikes us that the rules for this digital media will be much the same as the others ‘ music and video ‘ and that means that digital usage will mean requiring a lot more images.
The entire thrust towards music piracy was due to the desire to immediately have about 10 times the amount of music that you had held previously. It freed people to acquire it any time they liked and to respond to the immediacy of hearing a tune and wanting to own it. Mobile music makes things even more immediate, and TrackID systems on your phones, which listen with you to any piece of music and then tell you what it is and acquire it for you, are extensions of this desire for immediacy.
So now think of your favorite photo? When do you look at it, what are you doing when you look at it? Where is it? The chances are that it is on your desk at work, it is in your wallet or it is on the sideboard at home in your living room. You look at it for inspiration, to share it with someone or when you are relaxing or day dreaming.
The handset becomes similar to the wallet. But right now most people only tend to keep pictures on their handsets which they have taken themselves, usually on a 3 megapixel camera. The quality of most handset screens just isn’t good enough yet to show the picture, and the camera on the phone isn’t good enough to take them yet. The truth is that cameras still take better photos.
That will change. The rise of OLED screens will show better images, the rise of the 12 MP cameras on phones will mean we take better pics ‘ although the number of megapixels alone is not enough. We need to see easy zoom, better and easier to use light controls, and better lens systems before all those Cybershots can be retired.
The photo on your desk at work might be one of your mother, your children or your grandmother or father ‘ taken years ago. There is no straightforward way of simply moving it into the digital world, and remember we will want it with immediacy ‘ not by rooting through the attic to find a negative, take it to the local photo specialist and have them clean it up and produce a digital file. At the very least we will want to be able to move that picture from the analog world to the digital in the same way that TrackID works.
Put in on the platen glass of a scanner, send it somewhere, perhaps to a piece of software on the web, and get it back not just in an appropriate state for one device, but for all of them, the handset, the PC, the TV and the digital photo frame of any size. We can do things like this now with web based systems, but they still cannot take an analog, clean it up, make it look like it is a watercolour and drop it onto your wall or mantelpiece in just the right format. But that’s what it needs.
It’s like this when any market moves from analog to digital. It’s always much more complicated than you think, and the winner is always so much better off.
One of the applications on the TV set that IPTV operators are now trying to standardize on are the showing of photographs. They want a standard way of controlling them, moving them from the PC to the TV set, and of viewing them. But once this is achieved it will still be wrong, because it will only be for watching photo ON the TV. Most living room viewing is either done when the TV is not on, or when the adverts come on and you are looking around the room.
And even if you get some kind of universal digital photo viewing application which can run, like acrobat, on a TV, PC, handset, or a digital photo frame, there are other variables. Will it show one picture or will it scroll through them. If it scrolls, how often will it change?
If you are in the room you might want to see your wedding photos, if your wife is in the room she might want to see the first steps of the children. So will each person in the house have their own favorites menu, under their control. Perhaps they will train it, inadvertently by scrolling through their iPod using the touch screen to flick through and the more times that people spend on each one might automatically place them in the favorites menu and that might be accessible via wi-fi to your home server ‘ all with immediacy, so that you look up from your TV, and you see a picture you haven’t focused on in months, but which yours system just know that YOU love.
But WHERE will it show it to you. Not on the TV, perhaps it will pop up like an instant message, perhaps it will be on your private Facebook page, perhaps all of that will show quietly, without asking you, on the digital photo frame in your office and different pictures will show on the walls, and shelves of your home.
But we don’t only look at photo of relatives on our walls at home, we also look at works of art, and in many ways combinations of public photos might be exceptionally mood altering and evocative, so we have works of art and clusters of photos as ‘mood’ works of art ‘ all possible and all needing a route to market.
And if you do have other people offering you ‘mood’ themes, how will you pay for that, will they be integrated with your own images? Will it be a rental or subscription service or something added to the price of the device (Comes with Pictures)?
There are other questions to ask? On these multiple home screens, which one will take priority, how will they talk to each other, will they show video as well, and if so when? What algorithms select photos when you are in the room with someone else. Do the digital photo frames sync with TV advertising and stay on the same picture until the adverts come on?
And storage is an issue? Should all these pics by stored on your home server, and if so in what formats (Okay JPEG seems universal). Should your Facebook pics be automatically picked up and dropped into your handset, or home server? Should your handset be in control of all this and be given thumbnails of all your pics so that you can mess with the order they show in when you have a spare minute, while traveling or waiting for someone. Should your phone be able to speak to a 3G chip in your home or through the internet, to tell all your home graphic devices (there will be many) about all these display decisions, or will they simply be picked up by wi-fi when you walk in the door with your phone? Or by Bluetooth?
It’s not as easy as you thought is it, predicting the onset of a new digital format? Which is why the more complicated video applications are even harder.
So while predictions are always fun, what we need to know is how people will use the particular digital media in the future, not how they ‘imagine’ they will use it, but how they actually will once they know just how flexible it is. Because when all these questions are satisfactorily answered, the market will be many devices per room, and in the billions.
It’s a bit like before the arrival of iTunes Music Store. At that time the future for digital music looked dire. Suddenly, once there is thought, sensitivity and innovation in the marketplace, the sky is the limit and so it will be with static, personal pictures. It just needs some thought.