Consumers want greater control over their homes—the ability to manage not only smart products like their lights and thermostats, but also the services that provide them with connectivity and original content. For service providers, this means tapping into a network that empowers customers with a growing number of capabilities and products built for managing the entire home through voice.

Today, Technicolor and Amazon announced a new collaboration that brings Amazon Web Services and Amazon Alexa together with next generation home gateways from Technicolor that will allow service providers to develop new services for connected homes faster than ever.

Technicolor is a leader in digital innovation for the media and entertainment industry that works with cable, telco and satellite operators to bring bandwidth-intensive experiences into the home. The company sees opportunities for network service providers to build a bridge between cloud and edge technology to introduce new revenue-generating services while making home networks easier to access, manage and configure through voice activated commands.

Technicolor will use AWS for home gateway applications, leverage AWS IoT and Greengrass, integrate Alexa into its new gateway products to allow users to configure network settings and more just by asking, and incorporate Amazon’s Alpine System-on-chip into its new family of gateway products.

What this Means for Network Service Providers and Consumers

The collaboration has clear benefits for both service providers and consumers: NSPs will gain access to a broad developer community through AWS that’s constantly building new applications for the home, improving overall quality of service, customer experience, cost control, while addressing privacy issues by empowering consumers to have greater control over their own information. For consumers, Technicolor’s new services and gateway products will offer the ability to live and interact with connected home services in an easy and natural manner—through voice. This in turn will drive demand for new, more meaningful applications, incentivizing developers to continue to push the bar when working with NSPs.

Who Is Technicolor?

For 100 years, Technicolor has collaborated with content creators across film, episodic, advertising, and animation. It brought color to the film “The Wizard of Oz” and has applied visual effects, sound, and color to blockbuster movies around the world. It partners with NSPs to improve consumer access to content, and one million Technicolor set-top-boxes and gateways are shipped to people’s homes worldwide every week. And moving forward, Technicolor will double-down on its work, leveraging the power of AWS and Amazon Alexa to equip NSPs with the tools they need to create magical experiences in the home for their customers.

Getting Started with AVS

Device makers and service providers alike are working with Amazon Alexa to build voice-driven experiences for customers. Learn how to add rich, voice-powered capabilities to your connected products or services, and read how some third-party businesses are making it even easier to build and launch products with Alexa:

• ‘Powered by Linkplay’ Makes It Easier to Build Wi-Fi Speakers with Alexa

New to voice user interface design? See how the technology works by building your own Amazon Alexa prototype for Raspberry Pi.

Have questions? We’re here to help. Visit us on the AVS Forum or Alexa GitHub to speak with one of our experts.

AVS is coming soon to the UK and Germany. Read the full announcement here.