March 29, 2005 Oyster Bay, NY -- "Digital Home Media Networking," a study from ABI Research, a global technology research firm, identifies two factors which, according to the firm, will be critical to the creation of a significant market for home media networking: the bandwidth of a digital "pipe" that brings media content into the home, and the copyright concerns of content owners and distributors.
The firm's contention is that home media networking, defined as the ability to access the same audio-visual content on any suitable media device in a home, scarcely exists today, while noting that many homes in wealthy nations contain multiple home entertainment products.
Vamsi Sistla, the firm's director of residential entertainment research, says that, for future networks, FTTH 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," he notes, "But today, fiber is the only viable way to increase the flow of digital content."
The study projects a future in which a fiber node terminates at a central repository within a residence 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," notes Sistla, "which means you store content on multiple devices, creating multiple copies, and wasting storage space."
The issue of multiple copies highlights the study's other concern: copyright. According to the firm, as soon as digital multimedia content is placed on an Internet-connected device, intellectual property owners perceive a threat. The study contends that future systems that can stream media without immediately copying it will serve to calm content-owners' fears.