CES: A tug-o'-war over home-network topology
Three datapoints bound to impact the shape of the home entertainment network: Windows Home Server, Media Center Extenders, Viiv, and more.
By Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor -- EDN, January 11, 2007
Three days, three press events, three interesting data points.
Datapoint No. 1: Sunday evening, Bill Gates unveiled the Windows Server 2003-based Windows Home Server (more info here), a product that my past coverage of NAS probably has you (correctly) presuming has piqued my interest.
Partners such as HP, with its MediaSmart Server, will roll out Windows Home Server-based devices later this year. As Microsoft's consumer-tailored site suggests, the product will put a user-friendly face on NAS, something that my pre-Macworld Expo iTV (now Apple TV) predictions suggested was much needed. I'm also thrilled (albeit not surprised) to see support for RAID, although the dynamic capacity recalibration aspect of Microsoft's pitch has me thinking Microsoft's doing a proprietary scheme like Infrant does with X-RAID.
Many of the Windows Home Server's attributes (auto-backup, access from the WAN) are reminiscent of Mirra, adding credibility to Seagate's mid-September 2005 acquisition of the company. Others are multimedia housing- and streaming-centric; folks like TwonkyVision and Mediabolic, along with their NAS partners, are probably a bit nervous at this point. And presumably Windows Home Server code is also x86-centric, thereby making it amenable to branding arrangements such as Intel's Viiv initiative. Hold that last thought.
Datapoint No. 2: My Tuesday morning breakfast meeting with Cisco/Linksys. I received confirmation there that Windows XP-tailored Windows Media Center Extenders will not be Windows Vista-compliant (with the exception of the Xbox 360), due to protocol, DRM, and other changes that Microsoft has made. This is unfortunate but, pragmatically, the MCE market (again with the exception of the Xbox 360) hasn't seen much success, so consumer impact won't be significant.
(By the way, if you're confused about the difference between Media Center Extender and Windows Media Connect functionality, this page has a concise and accurate summary.)
I also got confirmation from Linksys that the latest iteration of the Viiv certification program, which I-O Data (for example) just received, incorporates support for PC-initiated initial interrogation of the Digital Media Receiver (or simpler Media Bridge) on the other end of the network link. This interrogation has (at least) two key functions: the PC can determine the linked device's codec capabilities, and it can also determine the speed, latency, and other attributes of the link.
Armed with this data, the PC will then transcode and transrate the multimedia content on an as-needed basis prior to transferring it to the network peripheral. Linksys' only "not included, but nice to have" feedback on Intel's Viiv strategy is that it would be nice to report to the networked media recipient that, for example, his or her video viewing experience has by necessity been degraded because of high network traffic—so that Mom and Dad in the living room can yell upstairs for their kid to log off Bittorrent (that last bit is my example scenario, not Linksys').
Note that I've mentioned Viiv again. And again, hold that thought. Before I continue on to my third data point, I want to give a plug to Cisco/Linksys. I've endured many years' worth of "it's all connected, and it all just works" CES hype from companies like Panasonic and Sony. While the promises weren't necessarily empty, they were built on a proprietary-hardware-plus-software-plus-services approach; the promise didn't come to fruition unless yours was a Panasonic- or Sony-only household. In contrast, the approach now being advocated by Linksys and others is standards-based (SIP and UPnP, for example), so that there's an elementary interplay between various manufacturers' standards-compliant gear.
At the same time, a common GUI and other factors mean that the connectivity experience is enhanced if you go all-Cisco. Look at the acquisitions that Cisco has made in the past few years: Kiss, Linksys....can you see the common thread? It's also neat to see technology that Cisco first rolled out to corporate customers, such as location- and user-aware telephony and centralized answering-machine functions, now trickling into the consumer space (although I doubt that Cisco will provide Asterisk compatibility out of the chute).
Datapoint No. 3: This one comes from a breakfast meeting earlier today with Texas Instruments. I'm guessing it's highly likely that you've encountered TI's vigorous DaVinci video technology branding program at least once over the 16 months since its introduction. Key to TI's (along with competitors', frankly, such as LSI Logic) hoped-for success with DaVinci in high-volume markets like the home is the same transcoding and transrating that I discussed earlier. However, TI's target isn't (for perhaps obvious reasons) the PC. It's the DMR (digital media receiver).
Which approach will win: Source PC (including PC server)-based transcoding and transrating, or destination DMR-based processing? Conceptually, processing at a common server source makes most sense. Why distribute the task among multiple destinations, thereby increasing their complexity and cost? But pragmatically, destination-based transcoding and transrating will also be necessary, for these key reasons:
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In homes containing multiple DMRs, consumers will expect to simultaneously operate many or all of them. Presuming sufficient network bandwidth is available to make this possible (a shaky assumption in and of itself), a PC can offer only a limited amount of processing resources to handle all the necessary transcoding and transrating, even in the burgeoning quad-core era.
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It's also not necessarily true that all of a consumer's multimedia content is going to come from, or at least through, an always-on, LAN-connected PC. Internet radio is a long-standing example of direct Internet server-to-DMR communication, something that the visionary Voyetra Turtle Beach Audiotron supported five years ago. The vision Steve Jobs espoused with Apple TV the other day—of content coming either from a Mac or direct from the iTunes Store—adds credence to my claim that it's appropriate to sometimes take the computer out of the multimedia-access loop.
To that last point, I'll close by saying that if anyone can pull off the proprietary, vertically aligned model that I earlier panned from Panasonic, Sony, and others, it's Apple, by virtue of the iTunes Store. But we'll have to see how long that holds true.
