Industry leaders push for home media networks
Chip and electronics makers Intel, Infineon, Texas Instruments and Panasonic have formed an alliance for promoting home networks for movies, pictures and music using domestic wiring. The four top chip and electronics makers will also help market and test a standard for wiring together computers, entertainment systems and TVs through electricity, phone and coaxial cable lines, which already exist in most homes.
The chip and electronics makers hope that the first products utilising the new standard will hit the market in about a year’s time. Consumer electronics and computer manufacturers have long talked of the digital home concept, in which entertainment appliances and computers are linked and then typically controlled from the computer, making it easier to share digital media content between various devices. However, a lack of common standards between makers of these devices has hampered progress.
There already exists a common wireless standard for linking home devices using Wi-Fi. Wired networks do have the advantage of being more stable as well as having more capacity, plus the building blocks for the infrastructure already exist in a majority of homes.
Intel’s Matt Theall, president of the new HomeGrid Forum, stated:
Powerline is the world’s most ubiquitous technology. There is a huge market potentially for this kind of technology, since it can be embedded in TVs, PCs, DVD players, and speakers - any home entertainment device.
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