Solving for In-Car Entertainment with Innovation and New Content

This blog post is part of a white paper on the Future of In-Car Entertainment. To download a full copy, go here.  

As I mentioned earlier, the future of in-car entertainment is full of uncertainty.  We’re offering a platform and the automotive industry is responding very, very strongly to both our DTS AutoStage audio and video offerings. Furthermore, we’re positioned to deliver what automakers need for the present and the future: wherever this goes, and whatever emerges, we can deliver it.   

The role of in-cabin sensing in shaping in-cabin experiences.  

While I live and breathe the entertainment piece of it, I do know for certain that our in-cabin sensing DTS AutoSense solution of the Xperi connected car business is a very, very important part of the future.  

As I see it, the future of entertainment across the board is personalized. The extent to which you can personalize an experience depends on the extent to which you understand who you’re personalizing to, or what you’re personalizing to. We think about personalization in terms of what people listen to over time. What in-cabin sensing offers is new dimensions of personalization and new dimensions of understanding people. Not only historically but in real-time. For example, you’re a generally happy person, but right now you’re sad. Your play history doesn’t tell you that. And we think we know you as an individual, but now that I know you’re in a car with a baby in the back, that’s a different part of you. And those kinds of insights can only come from our DTS AutoSense in-cabin sensing technology. This leads to a unique type of entertainment experience, made possible by that combination of sensing technology and personalized entertainment technology. 

What are some exciting features that DTS AutoStage has to offer? 

Let’s start with this famous roadmap of ours that starts at radio and goes to video. It starts with HD Radio, right? If we didn’t have hundreds of millions of cars on the road, we wouldn’t have the credibility that we have in the automotive industry. The death of radio has been greatly exaggerated, and it continues to be the number one thing that people listen to in cars. We get this question all the time from car companies: isn’t radio dying? Well, it’s been dying for 15 years now. And it’s not. It’s no more dead now than it was the first time they said that 15 years ago, radio is not dying.  

Talking about emerging entertainment trends that are supposedly supplanting radio, another way to look at it is market share. When you have 100% market share, there’s only one place to go and it’s down. And when you have 0% market share, there’s only one way to go and it’s up. And when you go from zero to 1%, you grew infinitely. I think people get confused about that.  

Going back to radio, we revolutionized radio with HD Radio, we revolutionized it again with connected radio (a component of DTS AutoStage). We’ve built on HD Radio and reduced the cost, leveraged the internet connection, and opened it up geographically. So that’s what we did with connected radio. Then we created more options like lyrics and events and tied things in through an internet connection.  

From there, when we combine that with the TiVo music metadata product, now you get into enhanced audio, you can bridge it from your radio, listening to a catalog or streaming music. And with that, you introduce a personalized experience. Radio was not exactly a personalized experience, but with connected radio the music piece is much more personalized. The personalized content discovery team’s content now starts to come into it as we make recommendations for music listening, for audio listening, whether it’s podcasts or music, and now you’ve got a platform, that’s the first time you’ve got the platform there. And we’ve added Vewd core to that. Then you got our TiVo OS for the car, you got our video offering. And once you’ve got all that in place, you’ve got your radio, you’ve got your podcast, you’ve got your music, you’ve got your TV, you’ve got your video, and you’ve got a platform, and we can layer gaming on top of that and we can layer all of the future services that come up on top of that platform. So that’s what DTS AutoStage has to offer. See why I’m so excited?   

This blog post is part of a white paper on the Future of In-Car Entertainment. To download a full copy, go here.