Sons And Daughters Of BBCMF , Wi-Fi Technology

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Digital Living Room Isn’t Cozy

The headaches of home networks have entertainment's future on pause.
December 5, 2005

The much-hyped digital living room that promises to connect all entertainment systems wirelessly isn’t ready for mass adoption, tech experts said at an industry conference Monday.

One big problem thwarting the spread of home media centers and other devices is that tech companies can’t agree on standards, said the panelists, addressing audience members who had paid thousands of dollars to attend an iHollywood conference entitled “Digital Living Room 2005” in San Francisco.

The tech industry is forcing its products on a market that isn’t ready, said Van Baker, an analyst with research firm Gartner.
Despite growing sales of media center PCs, “very few of those are actually in the living room,” according to Mr. Baker (see Media Center PC Shipments Up). Instead, consumers are using the devices as media-focused personal computers.

“‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ is only true in about 10 percent of cases,” he said. “Most of the time, invention is the mother of necessity.”

Mr. Baker contended the biggest barrier to the digital living room was shoddy home networking technology.

“If home networking stays the way it is now, we’re not going to get higher than about 30 percent [adoption],” he said.

All the panelists emphasized a need for device makers to agree on common standards.

“What you need here is people sitting around a table willing to redefine standards, willing to give up the proprietary advantage they think they get,” said Don Norman, co-founder and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group. “That’s the problem: it’s a business issue, not a technical issue.”

Gartner’s Mr. Baker noted that the Coral Consortium, a cross-industry digital rights management compatibility group, does not include market leaders Microsoft and Apple Computer.

Squabbles and Giggles

Personal horror stories about setting up home networks, dealing with incompatible and tangled power cords, and losing files were a recurring theme of the panel.

Mr. Norman noted that despite the fact that he has a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and led a technology division at Apple Computer, he had to hire someone to install his home television. lol...

Even Brad Hunt, the chief technology officer of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), who spent most of the discussion defending his organization’s efforts to impose protections on digital content, said he had stuck a home network product in the closet after hours of frustration over its incompatibility with his other wireless devices.

At one point, Mr. Norman, a skeptic who couldn’t name one recent product that he thought was worthwhile, sent the audience of entrepreneurs into giggles by poking fun at the long chain of acronyms used by Mr. Hunt to discuss a future of compatible devices and universal standards.

The other panelists and moderator David Pogue of The New York Times ganged up on the MPAA representative. They challenged the association’s support for restrictions such as the broadcast flag and its perceived hesitation in making its content available to digital distributors (see Court Rips TV Anti-Piracy Rule). A broadcast flag would make it difficult, if not impossible, to share copies of broadcasts carrying such a code.

Mr. Hunt said the criticism was undeserved.

“The content owners really want to enable the digital living room,” he said. “The PC is looked upon as a huge opportunity to deliver content directly to the consumer.”

Barriers and Prospects

Amid all the pessimism, IntelCapital’s Mike Buckley tried to provide a positive note.
He said venture capitalists have come back to investing in consumer companies in the two years since his company announced its digital home fund, and pointed to video search and decentralized digital distribution as interesting markets.

Mr. Buckley implied the market would be better off if it were these startups, rather than large existing companies, that were creating the digital living room from scratch.

“We’re coming in with big giants that have their own way to do it,” he said.

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