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Designing the digital living rooom - March 25, 2008

What will be the evolutionary path of the digital living room? Will devices drive functionality, or will it happen the other way around, where functionality dictates the design of devices? Speakers at the Future of Television conference disagreed.

"I think purpose-built devices for particular applications will have a shelf life," BitTorrent president Ashwin Navin said. "Eventually, applications will get incorporated into the boxes with the highest volume."

In an effort to push that process along, BitTorrnet is working with device makers to incorporate BitTorrent DNA into their boxes. "We're targeting network-enabled DVD players, set-top boxes and network attached storage devices," Navin said. "You'll see products start to ship later this year."

Eventually, Navin said, you'll see the traditional cable or satellite STB will disappear as well, as the applications it supports get distributed across different devices.

Anton Monk, CTO of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) thinks network operators will still have a role in determining functionality on a home network.

"I don't think you'll see [application-heavy] STBs going away anytime soon," Monk said. "The convergence of premium content and personal content is already happening in STBs, like the FiOS STB."

The biggest fear of network operators, in Monk's view, is subscriber churn, and delivering applications like video-on-demand as part of the network service is one of their most effective tools for reducing churn.

MoCA has developed technical standards for transferring multimedia content around a home network via coaxial cable, which is already widely used in homes thanks to cable and satellite services.

"The key for network operators in delivering these services is leveraging the infrastructure that is already in the home, whether it's their own infrastructure or someone else's infrastructure which can be incorporated using MoCA standards."

Perry Solomon of Fast Search & Transfer thinks network operators are conflicted.

"Operators are struggling with the idea that they used to be in the business of laying pipe and having a monopoly in their market but now they're having to focus on being packagers of content and applications providers," he said. "They're having to rethink their business."

Fast, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, is trying to help operators over the hurdle by providing enterprise-level search technology that allows them to aggregate information from other sources around the linear video they're already providing.





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