Everyone wants to be your hub
2 hours, 53 minutes ago
By Dean Takahashi, Mercury News
In the new world of digital home entertainment, a gadget is no longer just a gadget. It's either a hub or a spoke.
A hub's job is to gather all of the music files, movies, pictures and other digital entertainment scattered throughout the home. The hub then distributes that content to a particular television, music player or other device -- the spokes -- whether they be in the living room, bedroom or back yard.
Whoever controls this hub-and-spoke system will have the power to sell a whole family of gadgets to consumers.
Naturally, it's more prestigious and profitable to be a hub, much like Chicago is a hub for United Airlines. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, everyone pitched a different idea for the ultimate digital hub. Some proposals called for making someone else's hub into a spoke for a much larger hub.
The hub's coming has been trumpeted for years. But waves of products are finally hitting the market as consumers trade old analog devices for sexy digital TV sets, MP3 music players or entertainment computers.
Meanwhile, the technology to connect all that gear is increasingly found in the home. Broadband Internet access and home wireless networks are spreading fast. And hard disk drives now are large enough to store entire music and movie libraries. That makes the entertainment hub a more practical product.
And the increasing popularity of online music and movies has led to a proliferation of digital entertainment devices. Those spokes include personal media players like a new music/video box introduced by Creative Labs, the iPod music player from Apple Computer, digital cameras from HP and digital camcorders from Gateway.
"It's happening now because the technology has gotten to the point where connecting things together is easier," said Jon Peddie, an analyst at Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon.
The search for the Holy Grail of gadgets to meld computers, consumer electronics and communications has been underway for years. In 1999, Sony declared that the PlayStation 2 (news - web sites) was going to be a hub for networked digital entertainment. Anchored by video games, it would combine DVD playback, compact disc listening, and online connectivity.
Microsoft responded with its own hub, the Xbox (news - web sites). But these consoles never were truly networked for much except online games. And so the Xbox has been reduced to a spoke for another hub, the Media Center PC, which is Microsoft's version of the über box.
Resolving some infighting at Microsoft, Bill Gates (news - web sites) clarified the status of the Xbox when he announced at the Consumer Electronics Show this month that the Xbox would be an extension of the Media Center PC, able to play video or music transferred from the PC on a TV set.
But other players at the show had different ideas in mind for the hub. Hewlett-Packard announced that the Media Center PC itself was just a spoke in a larger system, dubbed a "digital entertainment hub," which is a kind of centralized computer, or server, for all the media stored on devices throughout the home. Those devices would connect wirelessly or by wires to the Windows-based hub, tapping into its endless supply of media on multiple hard disk drives.
PC vs. TV "The PC or the TV won't do what's needed to integrate the content into a single system," said Chris Morgan, vice president of worldwide marketing at HP's imaging and printing group.
One camp favors the PC, another the traditional TV set-top box. Ancle Hsu, chief operating officer of Ontario, Calif.-based Apex Digital, said the PC still is too complicated for many users. His company, which sells the most DVD players in the United States, is deploying networked DVD players and a stripped-down version of a personal computer that plays games and entertainment on a TV set.
"Consumers want a product that they don't feel is a PC," Hsu said.
Sony said that the PSX, which combines a PlayStation 2 with a digital video recorder, would probably be sold in the U.S. market this year after making its debut at $800 in Japan. Devices like this, combined with the cable industry's efforts to establish standards for cable boxes, mean that the boxes could be sold at retail and be used with any local cable TV service, said Dick Komiyma, president of Sony's U.S. electronics business.
The case for TV Meanwhile, Digeo, a Paul Allen-funded start-up, has taken up the banner of Moxi Digital, a Palo Alto company it acquired last year. Digeo wants to make the cable set-top box into a networked digital hub capable of sending video, music and all sorts of other entertainment to multiple TV sets within the home.
Hooking up boxes to cable TV wires is a lot easier than networking a home to do the PC's bidding, said Peter Kellogg-Smith, Digeo's vice president of product marketing. Digeo's allies include cable TV companies Chartered and Adelphia.
"We think the big issue is complexity," said Kellogg-Smith. "That's the problem with the PC and how to network it. But coaxial cable is already there in the home ready to be used."
Who will win? For now, no one.
"Consumer adoption is a way off," said Vamsi Sistla, an analyst at market research firm ABI Research. "They will wait until the picture becomes clearer. There is always talk about an all-in-one box but it's not there yet."
Contact Dean Takahashi at dtakahashi@ mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5739.
