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Fiber "Pipes" Key to Home Media Networking, says ABI Research (4/4/2005)

True home media networking - the ability to access the same audiovisual content on any suitable media device in your home - scarcely exists today, although many homes in wealthy nations contain multiple home entertainment products.

What will unlock the potential of true home networking?

"Digital Home Media Networking", a new study from ABI Research, identifies two factors that will be critical to the creation of a true home media networking market: the bandwidth of the digital "pipe" that brings media content into the home; and the copyright concerns of content owners and distributors.

Vamsi Sistla, the firm's director of residential entertainment research, says that Fiber-to-the-home will provide the bandwidth. "Eventually some other technology might be able to compete on data rate as well as on cost and speed of deployment," notes Sistla, "but today, Fiber is the only viable way to increase the flow of digital content."

He sees a future in which that "pipe" terminates at a central repository that stores all media content and distributes it to satellite devices anywhere in the home. "Right now you don't have devices of that caliber," he notes, "which means you store content on multiple devices, creating multiple copies, and wasting storage space."

Multiple copies highlight the other issue: copyright. As soon as a copy of a movie or a song is placed on an Internet-connected device, the owners of that intellectual property see a threat. A system that can stream media without copying it immediately calms content-owners' fears.

An added benefit is lower cost for the peripheral playback devices, which only need to contain a decoder, a network connection, and whatever screen or speakers are required.

During the study's forecast period, Sistla says, "Within wireless networking Wi-Fi will continue to dominate content-sharing within the home, but UWB and HomePlug AV networking shouldn't be discounted."

www.abiresearch.com