Oh My: INTC etc etc Electronics Giants Join in Sales Pact
1 hour, 3 minutes ago
Beatrice Arnfield, www.cio-today.com
The giants of consumer electronics are putting aside their rivalries to create a lucrative global market for digital media products.
Samsung, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT - news), Intel (Nasdaq: INTC - news), IBM (NYSE: IBM - news), Nokia (news - web sites) (NYSE: NOK - news), HP (NYSE: HPQ - news), Fujitsu, Philips (NYSE: PHG - news), NEC (Nasdaq: NIPNY - news) Kenwood, Sharp, Sony (NYSE: SNE - news), STMicroelectronics and Thomson are among the more than 140 companies that form the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), which has just announced its first interoperability guidelines.
Home Networks
Fifty-two percent of U.S. online households and 47 percent of European broadband households will deploy home networks by 2008, Forrester Research predicts in two separate studies. In the Asia-Pacific region, home networking will grow in proportion with the number of broadband households, according to IDC.
"Using a networked product to access content stored on another networked product from a different manufacturer is a consumer expectation and should be simple," says Scott Smyers, chairman of the DLNA board of directors and vice president of networks and systems architecture division at Sony. "The Interoperability Guidelines represent a global consensus among the member companies to make this vision a reality," he adds.
Networking Everything
"Personally, I think everything will be networked eventually," Smyers told NewsFactor. "Ten years from now, it would be very difficult to do business if you did not have a networked platform," he predicts.
"Between now and then, there will be a transitional period, but it is difficult to predict exactly when the transition will be complete. We at Sony would like to be leaders in the transition," Smyers said.
Interoperability Guidelines
The Interoperability Guidelines v1.0 specify formats for image, audio and audio-visual media. The alliance plans to release formats for smartphones and mobile devices in the future. The formats are based on open standards, such as Internet protocol (IP), HTTP, UPnP (universal plug and play) and Wi-Fi. They cover both wired and wireless networks.
"In the future, the home server will not necessarily be a PC connected to peripherals," Smyers noted. "It should be possible to buy a DVR and a TV [to use] by themselves without having a separate PC."
The Digital Living Network Alliance anticipates that member companies will begin marketing products based on the Interoperability Guidelines v1.0 by the end of 2004. Products will be identified by a logo that is to be released in mid-2005.
