ESSENTIAL PROJECTORS AND SCREENS
A MATURING MARKET Marketing and Communications Manager at Habitech, Sophie Graham, examines some of the key questions in the projectors and screens category. Home cinema is on a roll, but how is the market changing? No doubt the pandemic has boosted spending on homes and property, accelerating the demand for home cinema, which is great for the industry and distis with mature, high performance product ranges and support infrastructure. With so much time and money to spare - and nowhere to go - consumers across the board are prioritising home entertainment. We’ve seen demand for streaming services soar on all screens: mobile and fixed, so AV has never had it so good. This means that dedicated home cinema environments have become an essential feature of high-end properties while the desire for flexible media room spaces is pulling in new money. And greater visibility on social media
50 OCTOBER 2021
is spreading the word, or more accurately, the image of the home as the centre of leisure and entertainment, rather than somewhere to stay outside working hours. For instance, folks are discovering - and liking - the media room idea on their mobile devices, or they’re appreciating how outdoor AV can transform the potential of garden spaces, so online marketing is the place to plant new ideas.
anything to go by, there are new customers for everything we do. It all depends on what they want and how big the budget, but the tiered
good/better/best
experiences
can
really shift preferences upwards. Every time, it seems, there’s an epiphany - which settles the issue. It could be a realisation that a multi-use media room format would be perfect for the space available and family circumstances, or the visualisation of how to transform an under-
Where is the demand, dedicated spaces? Multi-use living room spaces?
utilised room into a designed cinema living space. Then again if the client has the cash, the flagship cinema experience might loosen the
Now that a new life/work balance has taken hold, and visibility is up, I’m expecting demand to grow across the CI universe. Our dealers are as busy designing high-speed networks to facilitate home working and higher quality streaming as they are installing the hardware to deliver the data. If the experience of our new demonstration rooms in Basingstoke is
purse strings. It’s a case of horses for courses and obviously there will be more demand for the lower budget solutions in the population at large, but in our experience the split isn’t clear cut. If there is a rule, it’s to get as many people as possible sitting comfortably in front of the screen, because the cinematic experience always motivates a willingness to spend.
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