News and Reviews....

CES 2007.....January 2007

Robert Lieto

    While previous year Consumer Electronics Show's (CES) proved the Audio Video and Home Theater markets had arrived, last year proved the computer is going to play a bigger part in the products integrated into tomorrow's homes and this year drove home that the Digital Home Network is the next frontier in electronics. But in many respects, the digital home is still a mass of products without a common way to link them all together. Engineers face historical levels of complexity in building the digital home. Video, Data, HD sources, set top boxes, players and TV screens need to be fed at the same time without dropping a frame. Digital Rights Management, Multiple media formats have to all be in sync for the process to work properly. The ultimate solution could require a realignment of the consumer industry from vertically oriented companies to a more horizontal structure, in which different vendors handle different pieces of the problem. This would make the consumer sector look more like the computer industry. The pitfalls are many. Read it and weep.

Home networks are hard to use and are still too complicated for the average consumer." If home networking stays like it is now, it will stall at 30 % market penetration" as stated by Gartner Dataquest a consumer analyst company. There seems to be a lot of solutions to the IEEE 1394 scheme but not the interoperability needed for wired and portable products across multiple vendors. Everyone wants to have a little something special that throws the wrench into the process.

The problem is not a lack of mechanisms to ensure what is called quality-of-service (Qos) on the home network, to the contrary, there are too many of them. Everybody has a different notion of what Qos should be, and if you have more then one Qos, you might as well have none. All players, media servers and the like want to control the Qos so that if you have a problem, they are the ones that get the service revenue. Problems get worse when you add HDTV and HD-DVD to the mix. it makes the Qos control problem worse because we now mix so-called consumer products with computer products. There are two groups working on a solution, The Universal Plug and Play Forum is tackling the issue  from a high-level software perspective, while the 802.1 Audio/Video Bridging Task Group is trying to make changes in silicon (hardware) for Qos. And, two other groups, The Home Gateway Initiative (representing the Telcos "phone companies") and Cable Labs (representing the Cable TV industry) are trying to leverage their work into the process. What a mess.

Despite the rise of networking (802.11n wireless broadband), Wi-Fi is not a panacea for the digital home. Other wired and wireless solutions will come on strong in the coming months. They include coax-based approaches from the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HomePNA), power line based HomePlug 2.0 and various flavors of ultra wideband. HomePNA leapfrogged with its 3.1 spec that will aggregate 320 Mbits/sec. over two simultaneous channels. The MoCA officials say cable TV will announce support for their approach this year. The .11n spec will make streaming audio better and video possible, as long as you are not using your microwave at the same time. What is common is that service providers see wireless as, expensive, insecure and unreliable. They fear costly service calls due to routine interference as well as thefts of service from unauthorized persons, say picking up a neighbor's wireless TV signals. Thus, Scientific-Atlanta has no plans to integrate any wireless networking into its set-top boxes this year, but it sells WiFi peripherals that attach to them via USB. Go figure.

There are at least three new approaches to Home Automation (Lights, security, HVAC), with plenty of companies backing each. Much of the buzz is centered on ZIGBEE. The open spec which supports star and mesh topologies. Another is Zensys which has about 60 companies pushing for the adoption of Zensys' Z-Wave wireless protocol in home automation. SmartHome is the third maker of retail products. They use the hybrid power line/ wireless network scheme which claims to have fixed the X10 reliability problem while retaining backward compatibility with them. I will believe it when I see It.

Short range personal-area networks (PANs) are every bit as fragmented as their counterparts that try to stretch across an entire home. The main underlying transport networks, Bluetooth and ultra wideband (UWB) come in flavors with various protocols running on top of them. Microsoft announced support for WiNet, a form of Internet Protocol over UWB. Nokia has rolled out WiBree, a low power derivative of Bluetooth for links to toys and gadgets running on button cell batteries. The consensus is that it will take 6-8 months for the folks involved to determine a clear definition of Bluetooth and UWB and in that time frame consumers will be testing the waters and more companies will be raising flags for and from new camps. It is not going to end soon.

Interconnects play a significant role in cleaning up the mess. Intensity is once again in the High End HD products that need great bandwidth to operate. On the wired side, DisplayPort and the Unified Display Interface are vying to become standard. The pair is competing  against the Digital Visual Interface (DVI) and High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) which already exists and are in products today. A nightmare of multiple standards, an oxymoron if there was ever one. The notion of a converged display interface may never ever happen and may just go away. On the Wireless side, SiBeam announced it has gathered an ad hoc consortium called WirelessHD around its approach using 60-GHz radios to deliver 5 Gbits/s in short range (150 ft). SiBeam will compete with companies using UWB to deliver 480 Mbits/s or more over an approach dubbed WirelessHDMI. Then there are startups like Amimon doing proprietary twists with 802.11n to make it HD-ready. Your guess is as good as mine as to what will fall out between them all.

Then we come to The Key.  Home networks are built to carry all information both personal and paid-for content, like songs and movies, but there is no standard way to protect the so-called premium content. Do to this dilemma, a whole new category of mainly software security products is growing around different digital rights management (DRM) approaches. Most observers believe the industry will struggle with an increasing number of proprietary solutions for a long time. Many see Microsoft's Windows Media DRM gaining momentum as a de facto standard because of its broad use in PCs, a prospect some industry folks and consumers see as frightening. Others are angry that APPLE Computer has not opened up the FairPlay DRM used in its iPod. Both Cable and Sat TV companies share some of the blame here because they want a closed loop, end-to-end system. That leaves the digital home with one DRM on the PC, another on the iPod and a third on the TV content and none of which talk to one another. Someone please say "I Give".

There is no standard operating system (OS) like we would like there to be. Linux was a system that had potential, but everyone wanted to make a slight variant so as to hold the key, so to speak. Some chip makers are at fault at this juncture. Roll it all together and their are too many COOKS IN THE KITCHEN. The net result is the Digital Home will face technology fragmentation for some time to come, and that is.... its biggest hang-up.

DISPLAYS   LCD took a big hold on the market with 108" and 110" Displays. None of which are available on the open market yet. Plasma have been made in 104" with 71" available in limited consumer markets. Plasma in 1080P native resolution (50") looks great and I consider it the piece to have by it giving 1080 P native resolution, its nominal cost difference and its availability. Many native resolution 1080p projectors have emerged, some single chip DLP with a color wheel and some three chip DLP and LCD. This is the way to go. If you are planning to buy a display or projector, pay the difference to acquire the 1080P native resolution piece. I would also check out the LED RPTV, they also look great.

DVD ......   DVD players in HD-DVD and BLUE-RAY were shown again. More software was on display but the product hasn't made the numbers they (the manufactures) were hoping for. I tend to side with the consumer, that only a few will make the change in this early stage of the product. The movie studios are still trying to cut costs, they are eyeing the download scheme direct to your computer which would cut a lot of cost in packaging and what goes along with delivery of that package. I still believe the common DVD has a long way to go. It comes with inserts showing titles, and other information not gotten on a download. It can compare to buying a CD and downloading a MP3 album. Quite the same.

Home Audio  Homogenized. I tend to see the entire audio market getting watered down. There are still manufactures like Krell, Harmon Kardon, Integra, Fosgate and others, but the line for strictly audio components is getting fewer in numbers. I believe that certain companies will pull away from the Digital networking scheme, just to be the "Only Lonely Line" left. It will take some time, but I believe those few companies that keep the product pure will be revered in the end.

Comment .....  Are we in transition ? YES. Only time will tell how the convergence of product will fare if at all.

CES 2006  Highlights of the 2006 Year

CES 2003  Highlights of the 2003 Year

CES 2002  Highlights of the 2002 Year