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September 13, 2003 |
A typical Canadian home, five years from now:
> a big-pipe connection pumps broadband Internet to multiple devices scattered throughout the house
> your videos and your music choices are ondemand commodities, in any room in the house, anytime
> radio and television are no longer scheduled by someone else. If you want to watch Buffy reruns at 10:17 p.m. then you go right ahead
> devices are programmable and customizable, even remotely. If, on your way to work, you realize you forgot to turn off the stove, no problem. Just link up to the house from the car and tell the stove to switch itself off
> and speaking ofthe kitchen, you will never need to run out of milk, bran cereal and Cheetos again, because your kitchen will monitor your intake as well as order replacements once a week from an online grocery service.
These and other domestic wonders are just around the corner.
In fact, enterprising gear-heads can assemble much of this functionality today, although it’s a bit of a grind. But in the near future?
“Microsoft envisions a hub-and-spoke architecture for the home PC,” said Greg Barber, managing director of home entertainment at Microsoft Canada. “The hub is the PC, a multi-purpose device which is connected to the Internet and to a bunch of different content; it connects to cameras, scanners, printers, wireless devices, etc. It is also the best place to edit and organize all this content.
“But you don’t want to access all this content in your home office. You want to look at it on your TV in the family room, but how do you get it from your PC to your TV? Well that’s the spoke idea—your TV and your stereo are the spokes.
“And new solutions coming on the market now will make that easier,” he said.
Step one down this future road will be installing a wireless home network. Market watchers In-Stat/MDR of Scottsdale, Ariz., named 2003 the year of networked entertainment. The company said the biggest driver of home networks has been broadband sharing among PCs, but new products are emerging to fuse the home network with TVs and stereos.
Plus, media servers that store and play rich content over a home network are now shipping.
These products, In-Stat/MDR said, will propel the U.S.’s overall home networking market to US$5.3 billion in 2007 from US$1.8 billion in 2002. The total number of installed in-home networks will grow to more than 28 million by the end of 2007 in both the United States and
Canada, from 9.2 million in 2002.
And what will people do with all this technology? Yep, blow away bad guys. According to In-Stat/MDR, the biggest multimedia home networking product will be networked gaming consoles.
Other key networked entertainment devices will be personal video recorders and DVD players.
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