The Sharing Economy meets the Internet of Things

This post has been reblogged by IBM and is reproduced on their Tumblr sites. The original is available below in its entirety.

Noise over what has been called Collaborative Consumption – and elsewhere The Sharing Economy – has been increasing in volume for some months now. Kickstarter, a crowdfunding business that exists to let people from anywhere in the world donate to singular projects, is a great example of this new philosophy. The company has played roles in funding films, games consoles and civic projects like the construction of bridges. Zeitgeist has made use of sites likes AirBnB and Housetrip to stay in lovely, very affordable apartments in places like Paris and New York. These diverse businesses aren’t necessarily united in a single cause to drive the sharing economy, but they are all trying to make use of what some economies, particularly in the West, excel at producing: surplus.

It’s an acknowledgment that there are physical items we own that we don’t actually need, which are eminently transferable – for a certain period of time – to others, with the market more or less dictating price (it’s this last point that removes any assertions or complaints of the idea being some sort of socialist utopia). At its root, the idea has been seen in media consumption for several years now; we’ve written often about the new customer mantra of ‘access trumps ownership’, where people prefer to stream their content rather than have it on a shelf. This is a bit of a sea-change in how we view ourselves. As a very astute article in The New Yorker pointed out earlier this month, we have often defined ourselves by what we own,

“For most of the past century, Americans have been the world’s greatest consumers. And usually consumption has meant ownership: just before the Great Recession, the average American household owned 2.28 cars, and had more television sets than people. But these days a host of new companies are trying to disrupt the paradigm… beneath all the hype is a sensible idea: there are a lot of slack resources in the economy. Assets sit idle—the average car is driven just an hour a day—and workers have time and skills that go unused. If you can connect the people who have the assets to people who are willing to pay to rent them, you reduce waste and end up with a more efficient system.

Zeitgeist believes that the increasing popularity of another evolution in business – that of connected devices – will dovetail nicely with the sharing economy. The widespread use of connected devices, known as the Internet of Things, is broadly based on the idea of having products that are intelligent enough to know what they are being used for, when they are being used, and how to make sure the user gets the most productivity out them. Connecting said product to the Internet is usually a pretty good way of doing this. At its simplest, it is the much-ballyhooed Smart Fridge, that knows when it’s running out of milk and orders more for you online without having to bother asking you. In reality, it is things like the Nest device, a (very) smart and (very) beautiful thermostat device.

Zeitgeist was at London’s Bloomberg HQ earlier this week for Social Media Week, a series of events usually dominated by a great deal of hot air. Fortunately this was not the case with the Internet of Things event. It quickly became clear that without the Internet of Things, collaborative consumption would plateau very quickly. There were fascinating projects like Pachube, which relied on crowdsourcing data in real-time via Twitter from an aggregation of sensors, allowing them to communicate with one another and at the same time. This information is not only not proprietary, it is meant to be built upon. It was used during Japan’s Fukushima disaster for crowdsourcing radiation data. 2000 feeds were set up after 10 days; Android apps, SMS alerts were built, all by different people, a great example of product and information being shared and being improved by being open to collaboration. On a more humorous level, Zeitgeist was also privy to hearing about Addicted Toasters, where the toaster is not just connected to the owner’s smartphone, or to the Internet, but also to other toaster’s in the network. If it sees that others are toasting more bread, it gets ‘jealous’. By which we mean of course that if it decides it is being under-utilised, it will decide it is time to go to the next person on the waiting list who wants to use a toaster. It does this by dialling into the FedEx API and getting itself shipped to that next person in line. The speakers, Usman Haque, said this was not just about “remote monitoring or control, but participation with others in how people make sense of local environments and how products are shared”. While the Addicted Toaster may be smart, and ostensibly aware of a network of other toasters, many aren’t holistically connected with a wider infrastructure. The driverless car, which companies like Tesla and Google are road-testing as I type, is set to bring about this next evolution, as described last week in an excellent article in the Financial Times. If we do come to a time when – as was suggested at the Bloomberg event – every product has its own IP address, then it means that every product is a lot more easy to track, and necessarily a lot more easy to lend to others. For, if a device is unique and ‘intelligent’, it should hypothetically recognise your own needs when you need it, and another’s when someone else has need of it. A world with fewer items can be pretty cool, too, if pretty small, as entrepreneur Graham Hill demonstrates with his New York apartment that is one room, or eight, depending on how you look at it.

All this sharing undoubtedly has positive implications for sustainability; a lot less produced means a lot less waste. There are potentially huge lifestyle impacts as well, which may not be as comforting. The New Yorker, again:

“It isn’t just companies and regulators who will have to be flexible, though. Workers will, too, since the sharing economy requires people to function as micro-entrepreneurs… They are all independent contractors, working for themselves and giving the companies a cut of the action. This has certain attractions: no boss, the ability to set your own hours, control over working conditions. It also means no benefits, no steady paycheck, and the need to always be hustling; in that sense, it fits all too well with the free-agent nation we’re increasingly becoming. Sharing, it turns out, is often a hell of a lot of work.”

Up in smoke: Trends in buying movies and content ownership

Like the main protagonist in The Artist, film audiences are increasingly falling out of love with physical film. A recent IHS Screen Digest webinar presented some interesting notes on home entertainment trends around the world. Most of it was far from good news for media companies.

Emerging markets are where a lot of industries are currently looking to for growth, from WPP to the Catholic church. The film industry is seeing growth here, too. China, which last year relaxed its quota on the number of foreign films it allows into the market every year, has seen record box office takings of late, with the release of Titanic being a major highlight. Russia, too, is seeing a new audience for film. On a macro level, countries like India and Brazil are seeing a significant growth in the middle classes. In other words, a group of consumers that has a larger amount of discretionary spending. Some of this spending will be allocated to home entertainment, in the form of video players, be they DVD or Blu-ray. However, this jars with the global decline in physical media spend, as viewers switch in droves to streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon’s Lovefilm. Data from the IHS webinar revealed that the global growth in video players will not serve to offset the decline of spend on physical media.

As well as shifting from hard copy to soft copy products, consumers are also beginning to show a marked preference for renting over owning. This trend extends far beyond the film industry of course. Companies like Spotify spearheaded the idea in the music industry, the phrase “access trumps ownership” has long been a mantra there. The philosophy is affecting many lifestyle aspects, as demonstrated by The Economist’s recent front cover article. In Western Europe, rental is now the transactional consumption choice for digital movies. IHS data reported that the average US citizen rented 5.3 films last year. The company predicted that revenue from rentals will go up, returning to where they were in 2009, but in large part only because rental prices will go up. Dovetailing with the increasing consumer reluctance to buy physical discs is that the medium also appears “less and less attractive” for retailers. Blu-ray, which was supposed to revive the disc format, has not taken off in the way that was hoped; IHS data showed most Blu-ray owners still purchase a lot of movies on DVD rather than paying a premium for the HD version.

The move from physical to digital formats is troubling to media companies because, IHS report, “transactional online movie spending will not reach levels of physical spend” anytime soon. Indeed, theatrical is predicted to take up an ever larger slice of the pie (see above). This is without considering relative externalities, such as piracy, which remains a huge problem in Asia. And while consumer spending on online movies will almost double in AsPac, the share in wider consumer spending on movies in the region will not move beyond the current share before 2016.

One solace could be found in cinemas, a special haven for a medium without distractions, providing ample opportunity to leverage some of the more irrational desires and behaviours of consumers. We wrote briefly about various opportunities recently, and it’s reassuring to see the news earlier this month that Digital Cinema Media in the UK, an advertising sales house jointly owned by Odeon and Cineworld, will “in the coming months” launch a mobile app that will attempt to track cinema visits in order to feed data back to advertisers. In return, audiences will get exclusive content, vouchers or free ice cream. Given that the cinema is surely one of the few areas where you can pretty much guarantee a captive audience, this sounds like a great idea. How much it will offset lost revenues from home entertainment though remains an open question.

UPDATE (30/4/13): Data gathered can sometimes be misleading of course because it fails to report things that are not being measured. Such is the case with the current trend, recently reported by The New York Times, of sharing multi-platform viewing accounts for products like HBO Go among friends and even strangers. This trend represents a threat to revenue, but also an opportunity to create further loyalty, if used wisely. Forbes questioned the legality of such activity in a follow-up article.