Value begins at home

I've spent much of the last two months writing about matters such as in-home monitoring of the chronically ill, using technology to prevent seniors from falling, and using home automation to dramatically and easily reduce energy consumption. So when an announcement came along from Verizon touting its new partnership with ESPN to deliver a fantasy football application, I was struck by the incongruity.

I'm not trying to imply here that Verizon is chasing the trivial while ignoring a much bigger opportunity because I know that it is pursuing many opportunities in the home, as part of its FiOS strategy, and that both home health care and remote energy management are on the radar screens of Verizon and many other service providers, including telcos, cable companies and ISPs.

In the meantime, Verizon and others continue to try to drive up penetration rates for their existing services, and that means appealing to that large mass of people whose favorite occupation every fall is watching football on TV.

That's all well and good, as long as everyone remembers that the endgame in the home is to become the company that provides the widest possible array of services via a transport offering and in-home gear that can easily accommodate everything from home security and monitoring to sharing of digital media to remote medical and energy applications. If, in the rush to add shiny new objects of immediate interest to today's broadband, that endgame plan gets lost, then telecom and cable service providers stand a good chance of getting lost in the shuffle, as well.

There are an inordinate number of companies eager and willing to capture the value of the next generation of home networks, including value-added resellers and technicians, contractors, retail outlets, utility companies, municipalities and local governments, device-makers, and Internet and technology giants such as Apple, Cisco and Microsoft. Many of these players see the broadband pipe into the home as just that: the pipe over which their value-added services or their in-home devices will work. Some, such as utilities and municipalities, want their own pipes into the home because they aren't satisfied with what their local service providers are offering.

Broadband service providers that don't want to be the pipe also shouldn't stop at being the video service provider, even if that video service comes with lots of fun features like ESPN Fantasy Football. Because ultimately, even video becomes just one of the home network's features — and not the driving force behind the networked home.