The history of technology is often best understood in the context of converging evolutions, and we are living in an era where premium audio and video are converging with the automobile in new and exciting ways.
A brief history of in-car entertainment
In-car entertainment technology began just over 100 years ago, in 1922, when Chevrolet sold the first car with a radio installed. The device was a bulky Westinghouse radio whose antenna covered the entire roof of the car. In Europe, the car radio arrived 10 years later with the Blaupunkt AS-5, which was arguably more user-friendly than the Westinghouse, but still a bulky device, and not something most car buyers wanted. Throughout the 1930s there was considerable public opposition to the “distracting” nature of radio in the car, and the radio didn’t become a standard feature in virtually all cars until the 1960s.
From there, the AM radio was joined by FM capability, and in the years since, the car radio cycled through various forms of portable media platforms — 8-track tapes, cassettes, CDs and mp3 players. Wireless networks have made it so that streaming audio is now the norm. The fidelity and quality of car audio systems in many vehicles today exceeds that of many audio systems people currently have in their homes.
Enter: The Television
While TV as we understand it today was largely pioneered in the 1920s as well, the television set didn’t really become affordable for most people until after World War II. Before then, television viewing was largely a communal experience. By the 1960s, TV sets evolved toward color and personal (even portable), and although they’ve changed dramatically in terms of shape and size over the decades, they’ve remained one of the primary device for media and in particular audio/video entertainment.
Today we have media entertainment everywhere: on the 4K TVs in our homes, on the smartphones in our pockets, and — more and more — in our cars. If you had told someone in the 1960s that you would one day be watching TV in your car, they would have probably not believed you. They would probably have wondered why you would even want to. But times have changed.
Converging evolutions
What we see today is a convergence of evolutions: the car has evolved, personal entertainment technology (both audio and video) has evolved, and wireless infrastructure has evolved. In earlier eras these convergences weren’t possible because the component technologies weren’t ready individually.
In many ways, the car is an ideal environment for premium entertainment. Car interiors today are acoustically treated in order to minimize road and engine noise, which has the benefit of making it quiet and acoustically favorable for high-fidelity audio. The interior surfaces of most vehicles don’t tend to create unwanted reverberation. Speaker placement is fixed, so it’s easier to balance and tune the speakers to the characteristics of the car’s cabin and the desired sound.
It’s been decades since you could buy a new car that didn’t have a radio in it. Premium sound systems are no longer just available in the luxury vehicle brands, even though these were the first car brands to offer premium audio systems. These higher-end sound systems have moved further and further down market to the point where most of the biggest selling mass market car brands now offer high-quality audio options. Premium audio brands like Burmester, Bang & Olufsen and Bose (to name but a few) all have their systems available in various cars around the world, and these are not exclusively available in luxury cars. Even so, the luxury automakers have moved further toward using premium entertainment experiences as a differentiator, and screens are becoming a bigger part of this.
The rise of front seat screens
In-dash screens began as a way to provide infotainment to the driver primarily, while rear-seat screens initially were intended to deliver video to back seat passengers. One of the earliest applications for video screens in the car was to keep kids entertained during a long drive. Front seat screens were typically intended for navigation and other non-video uses. But with autonomous driving and EV cars becoming more advanced and more prominent, entertaining the driver is becoming a reality as well.
With regard to autonomous driving, if you are behind the wheel on the German autobahn in a vehicle with a Level 3 Autonomous Driving Certification, you’re allowed to watch a movie while the car is moving at speeds up to 90 kph (roughly 55 MPH). As the world trends toward higher levels of autonomous driving, when we get to the point where humans are not required to be ready at any time to take over the driving task from the computer, it will become increasingly common for front seat screens to become more prominent and more advanced.
Let’s look briefly at Mercedes-Benz as an example. At CES in January, the German luxury car manufacturer demonstrated the delivery of IMAX Enhanced content in its E-Class sedans via the Sony Pictures Entertainment RideVU app. Adding IMAX Enhanced content titles to the Mercedes experience is a strong differentiator, because only the Mercedes customer will be able to access these in-demand titles in the car. Delivering films like Venom: The Last Dance and Spider-Man: No Way Home, in IMAX Enhanced offered by Mercedes takes the entertainment experience in the car to the next level. Combining a great sounding car audio systems with the highest quality video and DTS:X immersive audio powered by the IMAX Enhanced format, is a truly extraordinary in-car entertainment experience.
According to the AAA American Driving Survey, the average American driver spends 60.2 minutes per day driving, or roughly 366 hours per year. The car is now more than just a means of transportation. For many people, it’s becoming an entertainment hub. Take the recent trend toward EVs for instance.
As it stands today, most cars still have one single screen in the center of the dashboard. But that’s changing. Some vehicles have a large screen that replaces the driver’s instrument cluster and continues across part of the dashboard. Others, like Mercedes, are going toward a screen that runs the entire width of the dashboard. As with most of the car entertainment technologies we’ve discussed here, we expect this to be an evolution, not a revolution. It will be several years before front seat wide screens are the norm.
These technologies have only just recently begun to fully converge in this way. There is a fascinating future ahead for in-car entertainment as these technologies grow and mature and their convergence continues.
