An Article by Jason Knott, editor of CE Pro and TecHome Builder

It’s safe to say that the future of home theater installation is unfolding right before your eyes.

The “traditional” theater still exists and indeed remains a stalwart for the custom installation industry. You know it well… it’s the one where the homeowner sits in a dedicated room, or more commonly in a multipurpose room, viewing movies from a front projector or on a flat panel display. The images are derived from a physical media, such as a DVD or VCR, and hooked up by cables to a preamplifier/processor/receiver. The area is also equipped with a minimum 5.1 surround-sound system.

This is the description for home theater currently being used to determine the growth of the industry. In fact, in the annual joint “State of the Builder Technology Market” study conducted by the National Association of Home Builders Research Center and the Consumer Electronics Association, “home theater” is simply defined as a minimum 42-inch screen with a 5.1 surround-sound system. This seems pretty basic, as there is no mention of high-definition, cables or the media source. You might even file these under the “hang-and-bang / lick ‘em and stick ‘em” category of your business model. They may also remind you of the installation of a wall-mounted plasma or LCD connected to the home owner’s legacy equipment, including freestanding speakers. In any event, this definition clearly leaves much room for improvement.

By the way, for your own comparative purposes, the study showed the penetration level of “home theater” in new homes built in 2007 at 15% among small homebuilders and 9% among large production builders. It also revealed an average installation cost of $9,242 in custom homes and $6,702 in production homes.

But for most VARs installing consumer electronics in the home, this simple explanation of home theater is akin to stone knives and bearskins. The home theater of today, and in the future, involves more sources, more processing and the distribution of the video and audio to multiple zones inside (and outside) the home.

Here are three significant trends affecting the future of home theater that every VAR should be aware of:

Jim Barry has a pretty cool job. As spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Association, part of his duty involves traveling from city to city, wowing the locals with an assorted bag of the industry's latest gadgets - kind of like a snake oil salesman from the Western movie genre (except his stuff actually works). His most recent stop was Utah - Salt Lake City to be exact - where he toted and praised nine of the latest devices to emerge from the consumer electronics industry.

Deseret News reporter Brice Wallace covered the event, highlighting the main features for each of the following devices:

Digital Foci Pocket Album OLED 1.5: "...a $50 keychain photo display with a 1.5-inch color LCD screen able to show 120 snapshots. It's just one way for folks to show off all their digital photos."

SanDisk Sansa TakeTV: "A three-piece device that lets people download videos from the Internet with one unit and watch them on TV with a component that remains plugged to a TV. Control is with a small remote. Five hours of video can be stored on a $99 version, 10 hours on a $149 mode."