Brian's Brain

Much of my conversation during last week's Taiwan media tour with D-Link's President, JC Liao, focused on the Digital Home portion of the company's product line which comprises digital media adapters (generally, and Windows Media Extenders specifically), NASs, Internet webcams and the like. Liao led with an intriguing admission; after initial year-to-year growth, revenue in this particular product category had been frozen at around 12% of total for the last several years. Validating what I'd implied in asking my question, this statistic suggested that such products were stuck at the 'tech enthusiast/power user' consumer adoption stage.

Liao further confessed that 'these products are still too difficult for most consumers to use', and that his company was in the process of implanting a 'version 2.0' hardware-and-software strategy that would hopefully bear substantial improvement fruit. Like Linksys, D-Link plans to implement this strategy on a standards-based (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, UPnP, etc) foundation, although I won't be surprised if, like Linksys, the company delivers an enhanced all-D-Link services presentation to its customers.

My personal experience bears out Liao's confession. At the moment, my LAN comprises numerous media content sources (until recently also including a Windows Home Server):

• PCs (both the UPnP server built into Windows Media Player and, when I was still using it, Yahoo Music Jukebox)
• Macs
• An Infrant/NETGEAR ReadyNAS, running both a factory-provided media server software stack and a supplemental (and much more functional) TwonkyMedia suite, and
• A Linksys NAS200, which came by default with TwonkyMedia installed

Media playback destinations include:

• PCs
• Macs
• A Nokia N800 Internet Tablet
• Two Roku Labs SoundBridges
• Two Xbox 360s, and
• A PlayStation 3

As a reminder, I'm a long-time media streamer, thereby definitely qualifying as an 'early adopter'. Nearly a decade ago, I was already ripping CDs to a NAS and playing my content back through the digital media adapter pioneer, Turtle Beach's Audiotron. In spite of this learning legacy, along with requisite useability improvements over the years such as DLNA, media streaming remains a maddeningly frustrating experience.

Sources and destinations, which previously conversed just fine, abruptly refuse to see each other until I manually reboot one, the other, both, and/or perhaps the intermediary router. Firmware upgrades of one device temporarily-to-permanently break its cognizance of LAN peers…at minimum until their manufacturers develop and release firmware upgrades, too. And even when two products are able to talk to each other, content access is often underwhelming. Consider the following music-related scenarios I've frequently encountered:

• Song listings for a particular album are alphabetical-only; more relevant (at least for those of us who like to listen to an entire album at one sitting, in the sequence intended by the artist or performed during a concert) track numbers are ignored
• Artists, albums or tracks beginning with a numerical character get skipped
• More generally, various embedded ID tag information is overlooked or scrambled by the playback device…assuming that it's even accurate when it comes from the source. To wit, I've had hit-and-miss luck with the tagged content coming from both Yahoo Music Unlimited and the Zune Marketplace; what's the use, for example, of a double-album set of tracks with the same album name tag and no '1' versus '2' disc count differentiator? And don't get me started on the distinction between 'album artist', 'song artist', 'composer' and other nuances…
• A lack of multi-level content navigation makes finding and selecting a particular portion of the available material difficult-to-impossible. For example, what's the use of a sort-by-artist presentation if you can't subsequently access only a particular album's worth of the artist's tracks?

Photos and videos predictably have similar issues. I'd like to think this situation's going to get fixed soon, but after years' worth of patient waiting with no positive outcome, I'm understandably skeptical. The ability to easily and inexpensively access one or multiple sources' worth of material throughout a household or office via 'extender' devices remains extremely compelling, which is why the CE industry keeps plugging away at the problem. Here's hoping JC Liao and his peers eventually achieve interoperability nirvana; the sooner the better.

Followup: An interesting review of D-Link's MediaLounge Media Extender. Frankly, for around the same price (admittedly subsidized by anticipated future, highly profitable content sales), I'm still baffled as to why folks wouldn't just buy an Xbox 360 (whose Media Center Extender function is also compatible with both Windows XP and Vista) instead...