The past decade has seen the emergence of a “creator economy” that is elevating quality expectations of user-generated content. It is a trend that accelerated during the pandemic, as consumers around the world leveraged home connectivity and access to affordable high-quality consumer electronics to enhance their personal and professional lives.
It is one of the latest examples of how consumers are no longer trading cost, or convenience, for quality in business collaboration, online gaming and content creation activities.
These were among the conclusions of a breakout session on consumer electronic trends during the recently held 2022 Xperi Media Day event. The event, moderated by Greg DeCamp, director of mobile at Xperi, featured insights from Andrew Coonrad, head of product software for gaming at Logitech, and Matt Byrne, general manager of consumer electronics at Xperi.
A record number of “prosumers” — consumers with professional responsibilities or ambitions — is creating demand for a new category of competency across a range of markets. In addition to reading, writing and working with numbers, meeting personal and professional goals for many consumers is increasingly tied to producing and managing high-quality digital content. As a result, people are now as likely to develop expertise in working with digital multimedia technologies as they are to mastering the operations of word processors and spreadsheets.
According to Byrne, there are more than 190 million content creators in the world today. A whopping 40% of consumers are guided in their buying decisions by an increasingly professional “influencer” community. The level of professionalism exhibited by influencers is directly tied to the experiences they share with their audiences. This, in turn, is a function of the tools they use to capture and deliver high-quality content.
Cutting-edge audio technologies are a critical factor in this equation. It represents an exciting and rapidly growing market that is redefining how consumer and professional-grade tools are defined.
The trend is leaving an indelible mark on how partners in the consumer electronics ecosystem, such as DTS/Xperi and Logitech, work together to meet consumer expectations for quality and ease-of-use.
According to Coonrad, effective digital communications — especially audio — are now seen as critical for modern productivity. Beyond content creation, high-quality sound is tied to overall value creation. It is impossible to be productive if distributed teams, working at the office, in their homes or on the go, cannot hear and understand each other.
Logitech, explained Coonrad, has been working closely with companies like Xperi to enhance the digital lives of people by providing tools that allow them to work, play, learn and engage with each other.
Their collaboration on Logitech’s Blue VO!CE offering presents an excellent case in point. The Blue VO!CE microphone technology delivers real-time voice filters that reduce noise while delivering richer sounds that are cleaner, and more professional. It delivers capabilities to consumers who were previously priced out of this level of performance.
“When we created Blue VO!CE,” said Coonrad, “we wanted to take studio-grade processing and technologies that are ubiquitous in the professional environment and make them accessible to the growing number of users who need to create high-quality audio.”
Logitech partnered with DTS/Xperi to level up the technologies in a cost-effective manner.
“DTS/Xperi has a long pedigree of developing powerful audio processing tools,” added Coonrad. “As we presented our requirements, the teams at DTS/Xperi quickly developed a direct path to achieving the outcomes we wanted. We went back and forth. We got some prototypes. We integrated the different features of the offering and built it all into our software to make it very easy for consumers to access high-end audio solutions.”
Logitech, said Byrne, brought a clear vision to market that aligned with the values that govern how Xperi creates high-quality experiences, manages complexity and engenders trust.
