Digital Home Thoughts: The Wonderful World of CES

But there were high points of CES as Samsung, HP and Sony had strong offerings of complete media center PC-based solutions. While the big hitters and many of the other firms at the show spun tales of end-to-end home entertainment packages. Of course when Microsoft's demo at Gates keynote went blue screen it cast a serious doubt about how easy and reliable these plug-and-play solutions really were right now.

Many of the CES attending firms took a more modular - one step at a time -- approach meeting our home entertainment needs. You know, a HD-based media server, wireless link to the TV/stereo, DVR hardware/software that accessed the cable box or satellite receiver and other parts of the puzzle.

In fact, according to market analysts at In-Stat people are only now beginning to understand how they can purchase and use the new DVRs with interactive program guides (Fig 1). While most consumers according to a recent CEA survey don't have an audio or video media server, it is a product they are interested in acquiring over the next 2-3 years.

Because of the huge number of iPods and personal MP3 players that have been sold and will be sold this year we probably shouldn't have been surprised to how people wanted to use their media servers. But according to the CEA research, most of the respondents want the server more for audio than video use: listen to the same music in a number of rooms in the house - 52% store digital music collection and play it anywhere in the house - 51% record live TV and have it available on other sets in the house - 44% view digital photos on the TV - 41%

But when it comes to video content, the survey held few surprises:
• play DVDs - 91%
• store content - 88%
• access PC content - 84%
• download content - 75%
• record live TV - 75%
• distribute content - 74%
• play video games - 63%

Even Gates during an interview with the Washington Post said that Microsoft and the industry in general still had a lot of work to do to make the products user friendly enough for the majority of the consumers the industry wants to reach and sell.

IDC and Parks Associates, that has built its client roster by promoting the reality of the home network, both agree that the centralized and distributed entertainment system is still a long way from reality. We continue to focus on connecting computers, printers and scanners.

Like the home theater, the anywhere-in-the-house home entertainment system is still best installed by technically competent people with immense patience or dealer specialists. At CES we talked with Steve Wildstrom of BusinessWeek who just converted to an HD set and despite the struggle will expand his home network to home entertainment later this year. The task is pretty easy as long as you have two wireless networking specialists helping you (as we did).

Industry analysts and experts at Jon Peddie and Enderle Group had warned us that the wireless home entertainment network is easier to promote than it is to install, we understand why they both have gray hair. It is good. And it is getting better.

Hopefully by CES 2006 the installation will be fairly user friendly. Then all we'll have to worry about is having enough high def video content worth saving, which broadcast flag technology will be implemented and if it will allow us to simultaneously watch shows on several TV sets.

If not, you can probably kiss off the number one reason for struggling with a home entertainment management/enjoyment system. That could be one hurdle content providers won't let us get over!

The above article was written by Steve Sanders, an industry insider.