Mobile Magazine, June 2004
In the Air Tonight
Faster wireless media streaming opens up new home-entertainment possibilities
Listening to music on your PC’S tinny speakers or watching video on your notebook are about as gratifying as swimming laps in a bucket. No matter how much you try, it’s hard to appreciate the genius of Hendrix or the majesty of Lawrence of Arabia on such a small scale. But if you’ve ripped your CDs and DVDs to your hard drive, or if you’re streaming audio and video from the Internet, what else are you going to do?
Starting this summer, you’re going to stream that content right to your home-entertainment center and enjoy it as it was meant to be: large and loud. And you’re going to do it wirelessly. Several new wireless media adapters are hitting the market that will make it possible, even easy, to listen to your tunes, watch movies, or check out your family photos on your TV and stereo. All you’ll need are a wireless home network, a moderate chunk of change, and the patience and faith of any early adopter.
UP TO SPEED
Moving content across a home network is nothing new. Ethernet media adapters have been around for a few years, and several companies have adapters based on the 802.11b wireless standard. The difference now is in bandwidth. Those older adapters have enough juice to support audio transfers but not enough to stream much more than the shortest clip of video. But the new adapters, which support 802.11g, can handle much more data and move it faster. "Wireless-G is really solid," says Mani Dhillon, product marketing manager at Linksys for wireless media products. "It’s enough to handle multiple streams of video." It might not be DVD-quality, but it’s a big step forward from what you could do on an 802.11b network.
By the time you read this, D-Link, Linksys, and Netgear will be selling wireless media centers based on the 802.11g standard, offering plenty of power to play your media files where you want them. Gateway is shipping a DVED player with built-in support for wireless media streaming, and Linksys and D-Link expect to ship similar players. Sony’s RoomLink package, which works only with Sony Vaio products, also has 802.11g support. All these adapters plug into your television and stereo with standard cables and then talk to your PC through your Wi-Fi network. Using a remote, your TV screen, and software on you PC, you can either stream the content from your PC or directly from the Internet. Netgear’s media adapter also includes a USB port that lets you add external storage to the device so that you can save space on your PC.
So are these devices going to usher in the home-networking harmony we’ve all heard about for years, or is it just another case of the industry crying "convergence" without the technology to back it up? The demand is definitely there. According to a Jupiter Research study, more than half of those surveyed would use their PC to stream video to their television if they could. "When you have market demand that’s above 50 percent, that’s a real market," says Avi Greengart, senior analyst with Jupiter. "The notion of being able to have access to media (from your PC) in any other room is fairly compelling."
The issue is not the desire to stream media but our readiness to commit to a wireless home. "How many people have wireless home networks?" asks Greengart. "And of those people, how many of them use their PCs for music and movies?" According to a 2003 Jupiter survey, only 2 percent of online consumers have a wireless home network. So a whole lot of Internet users still need to set up a wireless network before they can even conceive of adding features to it.
Product vendors prefer to see this as a challenge rather than a barrier. "For us, it works two ways," says Linksys’s Dhillon. "We’re trying to touch people who already have wireless and play music, and we’re trying to help people go wireless."
WORTH THE EFFORT?
Even if you are wireless-ready, there are still issues. You’re just moving the data from one device to another. "Instead of being tethered to your PC, you’re tethered to your stereo," says Greengart. Then there’s cost versus benefit of wireless streaming. Greengart wonders if it will be worth it. "Do you really want to pay money to move your music from one room to another when you can walk down the hall with a CD or media card?" The cost and effort to set up a wireless media system at this early stage may outstrip the benefits for many wireless users, especially those who desire a more sophisticated setup, such as music in multiple rooms.
Software interfaces are another issue. It’s unclear whether these systems will ultimately use a common PC software interface such as Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center or if they will rely on their own software navigation. Currently, all these adapters use their own proprietary interfaces, and the media Center OS is still slowly rolling out into the market. Greengart estimates that it will be three to five years before the Media Center permeates the market enough to be the predominant OS on the low- to mid-range PCs. And that’s when streaming content will take off. "Once you have that installed base," says Greengart, "then you can start building with extension products."
Even if we’re not all streaming away yet, wireless media adapters are another link between our computers and our consumer appliances, bringing us closer to, dare we say, convergence. Music is the lure right now for most users, but experts agree that video will be the killer app. Intel and Movielink, the Internet video-on-demand service, announced earlier this year that they would collaborate to make it easy and inexpensive to download movies onto your home devices. "Those services [like Movielink] have a big handicap right now, because you want to watch it on your television, not your PC," says Dhillon. Once that happens, all we’ll need is a streaming device for our PC to tell our kitchen to make the perfect bucket of buttered popcorn.
