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To: Gus who wrote (4247)	1/1/1999 9:42:00 AM
From: flickerful	Respond to of 17679

31 dec 98..... from the winter consumer electronics show, an excerpt from cmp media: << ...networking is becoming a mantra for consumer companies. Their object is to build a home-network infrastructure so that "suddenly, a newly bought digital consumer appliance is no longer just another standalone box," irrelevant to the rest of the systems, said Lea. Connectivity- or distributed computing power on the home network-should breathe new life, new value and new capabilities into home digital consumer electronics, he said. Industry-wide efforts to lay the groundwork for a home-networking infrastructure have only begun. This spring, Panasonic plans to launch a 5.7-GHz wireless PC multimedia transceiver system called MicroCast. However, Liao acknowledged that Panasonic remains totally undecided which technologies-RF, telephone or power lines, IR or cable-may become the mainstream pipe to deliver audio, video and data within the home network. Nevertheless, the birth of HAVi last year laid the cornerstone for "a much more complete paradigm for networked and distributed computing," Liao said. He sees the network as the key driver "to draw the technologies together" in 1999 and beyond. But debate is raging over just what that network should be or do. "The added value of home networking needs to be more than just something engineers in Silicon Valley want to do at home," said Simon Dolan, vice president of marketing at the consumer division of LSI Logic Corp. (Milpitas, Calif.). Philips' Koomen argued that the vision for home networking exists at a much more fundamental level. When a consumer buys a new multichannel audio receiver, for example, the system itself-through the home network-should be able to register its presence and capabilities. It should introduce itself to the rest of the digital entertainment systems already installed, letting them know what it does and how the others can use the receiver's new multichannel capabilities. "The system should be able to take care of itself, without having consumers get involved in complex setup procedures," he said. Sony's Lea goes a step further. "A user ultimately shouldn't even have to care which device within the home needs to be activated in order to listen to his or her favorite song," he said. Showing the HAVi-based in-house network system demo that's installed in his lab, Lea said, "We can just display a list of contents to consumers. All consumers have to do is to choose what they want to hear or watch." In the new era of networked devices, most consumer-electronics makers have tossed aside the model of one powerful server as each home's sole link to the outside world. And even though many remain skeptical of PC/TV convergence products, LSI Logic's Dolan predicted that 1999 will be a year of "experiments" for many system vendors to launch such combo boxes as DBS/DVD, WebTV/set-top or DVD/WebTV. >>