The world of connected homes and are we ready for the customer experience Virgin Media is offering?

For many of us our homes are a hot bed of wireless activity with mutiple devices hungrily searching out our wireless router and munching up our precious bandwidth.  This surge of connected devices is part of the "internet of things" concept where more and more of our life is being hooked into the world wide web and bringing with it a wealth of new opportunities for business and a wealth of worries for consumers.  To read more about the internet of things check out an earlier blog on the subject - http://epiccustomer.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/epic-customer-experience-starts-before.html

The connected homes is something everyone from your broadband provider to your utilities provider wants a piece of....but why?  Why does my TV provider want to be involved in this and investing in technology to join all the bits of my house together in some crazy wireless spaghetti?  The answer is to get access to some serious customer behaviour information.  With the connected home whoever controls this will know when you are home, what you are doing, how you heat and cool your home, how environmentally friendly you really are and a whole wealth of other personal traits about how you live your life.  So is this the ultimate realisation of George Orwell's book 1984?  Virgin Media are doing some interesting work in this area and the following link shows where their thinking is but funnily enough doesn't make many references to Mr Orwell's masterpiece - http://store.virginmedia.com/discover/broadband/explore/connected-home.html

Personally I think the customer experience opportunities in this are epic and a reality of modern life.  If you have a mobile phone chances are your mobile provider knows much of the information that any connected home will be providing so best to embrace the horror and enjoy the ride.  Milk it for all it is worth and make sure you get the most epic customer experience you can streaming media from your home to your watch while topping up your fridge with some beers for later.  Epic.