Digital Home to Set Off Next Big Electronics Wave
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Mention "home networking" to most  people and few would imagine the routers, access points and  wireless connections that in a few years could become an  indispensable part of millions of home entertainment systems.
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Devices could be available to consumers next year, company says.
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A round up of some of the  technologies on show at CES that are making the digital living room a reality.
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More than 500 million homes around the world will have digital TV by 2011, according to a report.
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Battle for the living room focuses on next-generation TV technologies, and CES is the launching pad for those battle plans.  Photos: CES gadget glitz
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(InfoWorld) - After a series of false starts, sales of devices for the digital home will take off in 2007, the chairman of Acer said Tuesday. Large numbers of users will start to replace their current home entertainment centers with digital devices because the hardware, mostly made from PC parts, is easier to use and connect to other gadgets, and thanks to attractive prices, said J.T. Wang, the chairman of Acer, at a conference in Taipei. "This [2007] is the year all platforms, hardware and software, are ready," he said. The willingness of the entertainment industry to move forward on selling movies and music over the Internet is another key reason 2007 will the year of theÂ digital home, said Jau Huang, chairman of CyberLink, a developer of media player software and recording on optical discs. "It's all about content. It's all about experience," he said. Another important factor is the marketing effort from companies such as Apple Computer and Microsoft to promote new digital home gadgets and services. The iTV from Apple, for example, will put iPod content in the living room for the first time for many users. "We talked about [the digital home] 10 years ago. What a fragmented market it was then, what a different market," Huang said. However, Huang lamented one missing link, the lack of an industry standard for DRM (digital rights management) software, since it's a tool that companies can use to ensure users are only able to play their music and movies on certain devices. He said his company is working with theÂ Digital Living Network AllianceÂ (DLNA), which includes tech industry heavyweights including Intel, Microsoft, and Sony, on an open standard,Â Universal Plug and PlayÂ (UPnP), which will include a media management and control standard. DRM was originally developed as a way to stop Internet music and movie piracy by verifying that a user had paid for the content.
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In a few years, every new electronics device will likely have a network address.
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Upcoming set-top box will offer TV, digital video recording, and Internet access in one.
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So what about that dream of the perfect "digital living room," where you can access TV, Internet, radio, music, video -- all things digital, all the time?
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Give people a reliable, robust electronic gadget, and they'll soon start using it to play games. It's a law of nature.
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Decision may bring world of wireless peripherals to market.
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At the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, audio manufacturers -- of both home and portable devices -- are expected to be adding a variety of wireless features. We take a look at this and other top trends in audio electronics.
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You have a fancy home-entertainment system that can record and play TV programs, DVDs, show digital photos, and tap into your collection of digital music.
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Companies are teaming up to bring their technology to your living room.
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What kind of things do you want to be truly portable? That&#39;s become an interesting question now that so much is digital in our lives.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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The computer appears to be well on its way toward total entertainment domination in the home.