As for TV ads? Flat is the new up
TORONTO – The ways in which humans interact with technology will be significantly altered in 2017 and beyond, as mobile devices will be able to perform machine learning tasks even without connectivity.
Within the next 12 months, according to Deloitte’s 2017 Canadian Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT) Predictions, over 3 million smartphones in Canada, or over a third of phones sold in the year, will have machine learning capabilities within the device. Over time, these capabilities are also likely to be found in tens of millions (or more) of drones, tablets, cars, virtual or augmented reality devices, medical tools, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and unforeseen new technologies, says the report, released this morning.
“Machine learning will see everyday tasks become even faster and more effortless – so simple, that Canadians may not even realize their mobile devices have in fact learned these new capabilities,” said Anders McKenzie, partner and national TMT Leader for Deloitte in Canada, in the press release. “Not only will machine learning revolutionize how we conduct simple tasks through our mobile devices, but it will also improve the safety of Canadians through other platforms, such as better autonomous vehicles, responding to disasters and more resilient to cyberattacks.”
Now in its 16th year, the company’s TMT Predictions typically identifies key trends in the technology, media and telecommunication industry sectors that will have a significant impact over the next 12 to 18 months. However for the first time, Deloitte is pushing its predictions into the coming decade.
The company says that by 2022, fatalities from motor vehicle accidents in Canada will have dropped by more than 300 annually, a 16% decline from levels seen in 2017. The single greatest factor in this decline will be automatic emergency braking (AEB) technologies, where onboard sensors scan the road ahead and can hit the brakes faster than a human. In fact, AEB will be so widely adopted, affordable, preferred by consumers, and successful at saving lives that it may even slow down the movement towards full self-driving cars.
“This year will mark the beginning of a significant uptake in automatic braking technologies – a trend with an unparalleled potential effect – saving the lives of Canadians,” said Duncan Stewart, director of TMT Research at Deloitte in Canada and co-author of the global report.
“We could see the adoption of autonomous vehicles occur more slowly than expected, as automatic braking technologies provide an alternative option for Canadians who are attracted to the increased safety that they offer, but also still desire to control and operate their own vehicles.”
Additional findings direct from the report include:
- IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) to become 35% of IT spend. By the end of 2018, Deloitte predicts that spending on ITaaS for data centers, software, and services will surpass US$547 billion worldwide, up from US$361 billion in 2016. Although flexible consumption-based business models will not be ubiquitous by 2018, over a third of all IT spending (35%), they will exceed half a trillion dollars and be growing rapidly. This shift will begin to evolve how the IT industry markets, sells and buys technology across businesses worldwide.
- Cyberattacks enter the Terabit Era. In 2017, Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, a form of cyberattack, will become larger in scale, harder to mitigate, and more frequent. There will be on average a terabit/s (Tbps) scale attack per month, over 10 million attacks in total, and an average attack size of between 1.25 and 1.5 gigabits per second (Gbps). This escalation in the DDoS threat is largely due to the growing number of IoT devices, online availability of malware methodologies which allow relatively unskilled attackers to use insecure IoT devices and use them to launch attacks, and access to ever higher bandwidth speeds.
- Biometric security reaches the billions. The active base of fingerprint reader-equipped devices will top one billion for the first time in early 2017 (10 million in Canada), with each active sensor used an average of 30 times a day, implying over 10 trillion aggregate presses globally over the year. With the rapid pace of access and adoption of this technology, the challenge is to determine which additional applications could use fingerprint readers and other biometric inputs to provide rapid and secure authentication.
- Have we reached peak tablet?. 2017 sales of tablets will be fewer than 165 million units, down by approximately 10% from the 182 million units sold in 2016, suggesting we have passed the peak demand for these devices. While the numbers vary by country, there are three consumer devices that are at present leading tablets in terms of being the preferred devices for various activities, by a large margin: computers, smartphones, and TVs.
- Vinyl approaches billion-dollar sales. In 2017 vinyl will continue its resurgence, approaching US$1 billion globally in revenues for the first time this millennium. New vinyl revenues and units are likely to enjoy a seventh consecutive year of double-digit growth in 2017, comprising seven percent of forecast global music revenues of about US$15 billion in 2017. However, vinyl is unlikely to ever be music’s major growth or profit engine, with the future of music squarely focused on digital.
- The final frontier for digital navigation is indoors. As of 2022, at least a quarter of all human and machine uses of precision digital navigation will include an indoor portion or be for an entirely indoor journey, compared to less than 10% of all uses in 2017. Being able to locate people and objects when indoors will be transformative, and is likely to benefit most vertical sectors, and have impacts on government, business, and consumers (especially those with disabilities) alike.
- 5G: A revolution in evolution, even in 2017. Significant, tangible steps towards the deployment of 5G, the fifth generation of cellular networks, will take place in 2017. Planned upgrades to 4G networks, as well as the performance of the first limited 5G deployments, should acquaint users and operators with several of the most important features of 5G networks, including significantly higher speeds, lower latency, and support for low-power low-bitrate IoT devices and sensors.
- TV advertising to remain flat (but that’s okay). While US TV advertising revenue in 2017 will be flat with 2016, this forecast is a positive outlook for an industry that too often is declared a vanishing business – flat is the new up. Spending will remain steady due to several factors including daily TV viewing remaining robust, ad skipping is relatively limited, older Americans are watching slightly more TV, and streaming continues to lack TV’s mass appeal for certain kinds of advertisers. Canadian TV advertising is expected to follow roughly the same trend.
Full details about the Canadian TMT Predictions are available here: www.deloitte.com/predictions
