e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

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OT-The Entertainment Server(May 9, 2002)
By WILSON ROTHMAN


IT is five years from now and, of course, you are on the couch. You are pointing your remote control at the television set, but you are not just browsing TV channels, of which you have more than your fair share. The menu also includes virtually every song you have ever heard of, your favorite movies and series episodes, and 20 albums' worth of family photos.

Where is all this coming from? For the most part, it will be stashed right at home. Perhaps you will keep your audio and video files on your PC — or perhaps on an appliance called an entertainment server.

Entertainment servers are making their way onto the rack next to the television. These various devices — game systems, audio centers, set-top boxes and digital video recorders — have four common attributes: a microprocessor, networking capability, a graphical user interface and a huge hard drive.

New products like Pioneer's Digital Media Library and the Moxi set-top box from Digeo will soon be on the market to provide storage and easy access to your audio and video files. Meanwhile, existing products — including digital video recorders like TiVo and Replay, and music juxeboxes like the RioCentral from SonicBlue — already have the potential to perform similar media-juggling tricks.

In short, a battle for control of your living room is about to be waged by consumer electronics makers, developers of personal-computer hardware and software, and set-top-box designers that sell directly to cable and satellite providers. Now that home networking is a reality (albeit a tricky one), companies are building devices that not only store or connect to a range of entertainment choices but also communicate with one another to distribute those choices throughout the home.

Although the possibilities are broad, the challenge is clear: making the new digital experience as effortless from the couch as the old one. While developers may talk in terms of networking, interoperability, user interface and media management, they aim to create products that do not require consumers to notice any of that.

According to an estimate by IDC, a research firm in Framingham, Mass., about 2.8 million devices equipped with hard drives had made it into American living rooms by the end of last year — not including PC's. Though many of these were first-generation digital video recorders, about half were Xbox game consoles, Microsoft's Trojan horse of an entertainment server.

Microsoft's decision to put a hard drive into the device set it apart from its competitors, Sony and Nintendo. Though Microsoft says it has no immediate plans to make more of the Xbox than a game console — which, by the way, can also rip CD's and play DVD's — the foot is in the door.

"In terms of types of media it can intake and store and process, the Xbox is a PC," said Ryan Jones, an analyst at the Yankee Group, a research and consulting firm. "A PC veiled behind a killer app: video games."

Other companies also have the technology to put a networked entertainment server into your living room, but the question is, under what premise? While SonicBlue — the developer of ReplayTV, the Rio digital music players, and GoVideo DVD and VHS products — could combine all those functions in one box, it thinks that would be a mistake.

"Building a convergence product is easy," said Andy Wolfe, SonicBlue's chief technical officer. "But making it cost-effective and consumer-friendly — those are big challenges. You want to be able to explain to a customer what a product does in 10 seconds." Lowering the cost of single-application products, he said, is a much higher priority. Today, aside from game consoles, it is hard to find an entertainment server that costs less than $500.

Still, traditional arguments against convergence do not necessarily pertain. If you wanted to build a digital camcorder that also takes high-quality still images, you would have to install two image-capturing devices. But adding music-jukebox capability to a digital video recorder, or enabling DVD playback on a game console that already uses a DVD-ROM drive, is simply a software update. By this fall, TiVo customers will have the option of activating a RealOne media player, already a common feature on PC's. While the precise configuration has yet to be announced, the TiVo application is likely to provide not only streaming audio and video from the Internet, but also the ability to store and play hours of music directly from the TiVo's drive.

The convergence equation is somewhat different for cable and satellite TV providers, which already have a claim to a box in most living rooms. For starters, as far as killer apps go, they arrive at your house with 300 channels' worth. Furthermore, you do not have to buy the hardware; you rent it. Manufacturers like Scientific Atlanta and Motorola are devising boxes that offer digital video recording, integrated high-speed modems and home-networking capability.

All of this sounds familiar to Digeo, which recently acquired a set-top-box designer, Moxi. Earlier this year, the Moxi box was unveiled as a Swiss Army knife of living-room survival: an all-in-one cable tuner and modem, digital video recorder, jukebox and DVD player. If it works its way into our homes (without the DVD player), it will be as an optional upgrade from the standard cable box. Even then, what you see is not all you will get. "Other features will already be supported in the box," said Rita Brogley, Digeo's executive vice president for Moxi. "If someone says, `Yeah, I do want cable-modem service,' they'll find out that the cable modem is already in there."

So far, while most of the devices can take advantage of home networking, few actually require it, and for good reason: even though the trend is growing, only 5 percent of homes will have any kind of network this year, according to IDC.

But some major consumer electronics companies are introducing network-dependent products. Digital Media Library from Pioneer will be able to rip CD's into MP3 format and play back through TV's and stereos connected directly to it, but you would not buy it for that. When added to a network, it becomes a powerful tool for storing files that would otherwise reside on your PC, and distributing audio and video through the house with the help of cheaper boxes, known as clients.

It sounds ominously like something only technology professionals could set up, but Pioneer and its software partner, Mediabolic, say that when it is released, either this year or early next year, the product will be as simple as any DVD player.

"We're taking an easy consumer electronics approach, instead of trying to force fit a PC solution," said Jeremy Toeman, director of business strategy for Mediabolic.

Pioneer is so confident of its ease of use, the company plans to incorporate the library and client technology into traditional products as well.

"It won't be anything experimental, like e-mail on the TV," Mr. Toeman said. "It's entertainment."

In the next couple of years, Sony plans to introduce a similar product, the Personal Network Home Storage device. A concept product demonstrated last fall had a capacity of one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, which means it could hold either 450 hours of DVD-quality movies, 1,500 CD's or 600,000 high-resolution photographs. Presumably that sort of box would sit in the corner of the room or in the basement (one nickname for entertainment servers is "media furnace"). Sony also plans to offer networking in most of its consumer products, so that the content in your media furnace could be vented not only through TV's and audio receivers but also through clock radios and MiniDisc players.

The reason all this is not yet on the market is that manufacturers are still searching for answers to the big questions of simple interoperability.

"There's certainly the expectation among consumers that an RCA device or a Sony device will be relatively straightforward to use," said Susan Kevorkian, an analyst at IDC.

Again, cable and satellite TV providers may offer a possible networking solution: since technicians are already coming to your house, why don't they set it up?

"Cable companies can come in and install a media server in your home," said Adi Kishore, a Yankee Group analyst. "They provide it, run it and generate revenue from it."

Come what may, you may soon start noticing network ports in the back of everything, even your DVD player and your TV. Hard drives will show up in cable boxes and other devices. Manufacturers are likely to devise new applications in the hope of establishing the advantages to home networking, without making it seem too hard. In the end, after all, what they are selling is meant to let you kick back and stop thinking for a little whilehttp://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/09/technology/circuits/09HOME.html?rd=hcmcp?p=04318A04318Jc3F012000mC...
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