IoT, Connected Home, Still Taking Shape, AT&T's Lurie Says

The growth in the number of smartphones will continue, AT&T Mobility CEO Glenn Lurie told the CTIA conference Thursday in a keynote. “There’s tons of gas in smartphones,” he said here in Las Vegas. “We have tons of opportunity to continue to grow.” Mobile video, the connected home and the IoT will all be part of the growth, he said. “Our future in this industry in our opinion is about mobility and video -- people having the ability to take their content, view it anywhere, anytime, on any device they want.” AT&T earlier this year said 50 percent of the usage on its network is video, he said. Smartphones aren't the entire market, Lurie said. “I want you to think about tablets, I want you to think about cars, I want you to also think about the enterprise marketplace.” AT&T’s buy of DirecTV is just part of the story as the company looks at video, he said. The connected home is the first thing many customers want to talk about, he said. But it's unclear what the connected home will look like, he said. “If I would have asked all of you in 2000 what do you want your smartphone, what would you have told me?” Lurie asked. “You didn’t know. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what an app store would do.” The IoT is “very, very hard to define because it’s everything,” he said. “Every single thing in our lives is going to be connected.” Some estimates are that the IoT market could be made of 50 billion devices, using a wide variety of protocols. “We have really entered a new era in our business,” said Lurie. “The smartphone has taken us to a new place.” No one leaves their home without their smartphone and it doesn't matter what it will be called. "There's going to be a device that runs your life," said Lurie.