In the mid-2000s, if you happened to know an audiophile or two, chances are you had spent more minutes than you’d have preferred pretending to marvel at the acoustic grandeur of your friend’s home theater setup. You know: a speaker tucked into every corner of the living room, including underneath the couch, near the missing Cheetos bag. Blasting the money scene from “Independence Day,” your buddy peered at you eagerly from across the room in anticipation of your envy.
But: As impressive as these audio marvels were, they were too expensive and too cumbersome for the average consumer to reckon with. Partly because of this, adoption of premium surround-sound gear that rode the Blu-ray wave of the mid-2000s stalled out, with the popularity of high-end audio-video systems falling “somewhere below that of bedbugs and above that of Justin Bieber’s mustache,” per the New York Times tech writer Brent Butterworth.
Thus, even as video resolutions and TV-set affordability improved, many TV watchers were left with a Hobson’s choice: find an able teenager in the neighborhood to rig up a surround-sound AV system or make do with the stereo speakers left over from your college dorm room.
Now, there’s a surge of interest in the modern wunderkind of the home theater environment: The soundbar. A slim profile, easy installation and improved audio quality have teamed to make soundbars from the likes of Sonos, Samsung, Roku and others the fast-growth darlings of the modern home theater ecosystem.
Soundbars are now present in 36% of U.S. homes, per the Consumer Technology Association, with penetration rising 6 points last year. With newer iterations supporting the latest immersive surround-sound formats, and entries like Roku’s 4K-capable “Streambar” advertised as low as $99, soundbars are now a key piece of the new home theater revolution that appears to be poised at a sort of tipping point.
Familiar theme
If this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. For decades, movie studio theorists and television industry executives have fantasized about a new exhibition environment, whereby consumers, at scale, would be able to enjoy theater-like experiences in their own homes.
But for just as many years, this vision remained a far-off phantasm, gated by the reality that the combination of stunning pictures and magnificent sound either cost too much, or was too complex, to bother with.
That’s changing. Prompted partly by the stay-at-home pressures of the health pandemic, we’re reaching a point where a meaningful share of American homes now has something legitimately approaching a true “home theater” environment.
True home theater
It starts with TV screen sizes. Today the average size of LCD sets used in the U.S. is 50 inches, corner to corner. That’s double the 2011 average, and nearly 2.7x the 2001 number, according to the Consumer Technology Association. Current trends tell us adoption rate for larger sets will only increase. A December 2020 NPD Group survey found the average size of a replacement TV was 51 inches in 2020, compared with 2018’s average of 47 inches. Also: People are buying new TVs faster. NPD found the average age of an LCD TV set in the U.S. as of late 2020 was 4.9 years, down from 5.4 a year before.
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TV sets are more affordable, too. Earlier this month, for example, we spotted a Best Buy advertisement for a Samsung 70-inch, 4K-capable TV priced at $699, translating to a price-per-square-inch of about 33 cents. In 2004, buyers paid around $2.15/square inch for a 25-inch screen, then the prevalent size.
Better image quality has accompanied this growth spurt. Although high-definition TV came onto the scene commercially starting in the late-1990s, by 2009 only about one-third of homes were HD-capable. And even as the share of U.S. homes outfitted with HDTV steadily rose, reaching 77% by 2014 (Leichtman Research Group), it became apparent that having an HD-capable screen wasn’t by itself the breakthrough everyone was waiting for. Instead, it was just one ingredient in a broader convergence. The others were affordable high-end sound systems (thanks, soundbars) and larger screens. Now, all three of these ingredients are in place.
Oh, and one more thing. This convergence has been twinned with a shift in how we get television in the first place. The streaming video era has brought more choice to consumers, both in terms of title availability and in terms of user control. In turn, streaming (especially in the pandemic environment) has provoked more emphasis on in-home exhibition and away from communal theater experiences.
Almost weekly there’s a new indication that studios are rethinking the role of movie theaters. The latest example was a report this month that Sony Pictures was considering bypassing theaters for the forthcoming premier of the animated “Hotel Transylvania 4” and instead was negotiating with Amazon for an in-home debut. That simply doesn’t happen, even with streaming, if TV sets are still 25-inches tip-to-tip, and if getting decent sound requires a consumer electronics pedigree.
The questions are: Who benefits? And whose business models are pressured to change as a consequence? It’s logical to think that as more people watch on big screens with killer sound, in-home program preferences will drift toward visually impressive fare that makes the most of the modern home theater system. That has positive implications for programmers ranging from Discovery Inc. – expect more awe-inspiring views of mansions on HGTV and rainforest expeditions on Discovery Channel – to AMC Networks and the company's visually rich scripted series like “The Walking Dead” or BBC America’s atmospheric “Dr. Who.”
We also believe the widening gap between the video grandeur on the living room TV and the utility of the smartphone screen will tend to further bifurcate what people watch where, with mobile devices more commonly used for news and clips, while prime-time watching in the home favors visually arresting fare.
Or, who knows? Maybe something else altogether happens. Maybe video games on the big screen siphon off TV watching time altogether. Maybe the allure of theater-like experiences sparks a resurgence in the transactional VOD category, which lately has taken a backseat to all-you-can-watch subscription plans. Nobody really knows yet. The point, though, is that we’ve been hearing about the marvels of the home theater revolution at least since the launch of MTV in the summer of 1981. Now, we’re about to see what happens when it’s finally here.
Stewart Schley is Senior Vice President and Lead Analyst for One Touch Intelligence, which provides market intelligence and industry analysis services for leading companies in the media and telecommunications space. The One Touch Intelligence STREAMTRAK® series is a complimentary service offering industry professionals insights and context around developments in the digital media sphere.
Industry Voices are opinion columns written by outside contributors—often industry experts or analysts—who are invited to the conversation by FierceVideo staff. They do not represent the opinions of FierceVideo.