Parks Associates announce the preliminary agenda, featuring the core topic areas of CONNECTIONS: The Digital Living Conference & Showcase, including mobility and communications, entertainment and content, connected consumer electronics, and cloud-based value-added services.

The three-day event, June 28-30 at Santa Clara, Calif., offers a unique mix of market research presentations, trending data, insight from industry leaders, and discussion of the current strategies and future challenges in providing connectivity and technology services for consumers.

Cloud media is an important topic at this year’s CONNECTIONS due to the challenges for this market in reaching its tremendous potential. Parks Associates research finds consumers are highly interested in the cloud concept, notably the prospect of having anytime, anywhere access to their media. However, less than one-third of U.S. broadband households see the value of the digital locker concept specifically for music, photo, or video content, due in large part to current fragmentation of the market.

“Current cloud services are mostly one-way solutions – pushing content to the consumer – and limited to one type of media,” said Kurt Scherf, VP, Principal Analyst, Parks Associates. “For a solution to fit the personal cloud category, it must offer the ability to upload all content to remote storage, enable ubiquitous access from multiple IP-connected devices, and work with multiple formats. At CONNECTIONS, we will analyze new solutions and the demand for offerings such as online data/backup services that allow consumers to access and update files and content from any connected device.”

Jon Cody, Senior Vice President, Digital Media, Fox Networks Group, will present the opening keynote at CONNECTIONS on Wednesday, June 29.

CONNECTIONS sponsors include Association Sponsor CEA; Gold Sponsors Affinegy, Allegro, HCL, and Rovi; Silver Sponsors AwoX, LEVEL Studios, a Rosetta Company, and PacketVideo; and Bronze Sponsors iTOK.net and Sonic Solutions. Premier Program Members are Gigle Networks, HCL, Intel, LEVEL, PacketVideo, ProVision Communications, Rovi, Sigma Designs, and Verizon Wireless.