Everybody wants in on the digital home. Home networking and digital entertainment have been the focus of CES for the past years, and this years thing are bound to get worse.

In a strong reminder to days of the internet hype, companies are looking at their existing product line-ups and try to take short cuts to enable them for the digital home. Slap on a wifi radio, bundle some proprietary software and you've got a brilliant demo and a horrible product.

Hard disk manufacturer Maxtor at CES plans to unveil a "new family of innovative consumer storage products to store and share videos/photos/MP3s, etc," the company is saying in a PR pitch leading up to the show.

So expect Maxtor to launch some kind of media server device that will make data accessible throughout the home. I have no doubt that is will work. And personally I would like to see an inexpensive device that will stream media across the home without the need of a computer – as is the case in current generation media adapters. Something that you put in the meter closet and access about once a year. But I doubt that Maxtor will be able to actually deliver.

San Disk – the maker of flash memory chips that power the world's digital camera's - earlier this year unveiled its TrustedFlahs MicroSD memory cards in an effort to turn a memory chip into a CD or DVD. It just has yet to sign up any partners and face the fact that its flash albums are more expensive than music downloads or an old fashioned DVD.

The home media networking vision by now is about three years old, and has failed to excite consumers. These home networks are simply impossible to set up and manage, unless you are will to buy into a vendor lock-in. Surely Maxtor too will create a brilliant solution with a flashy demonstration, as San Disk did earlier this year.

But don't count on being able to replicate all that at home without spending a small fortune on new equipment, and without a PhD in networking technology.

SanDisk chief executive Eli Harari unveils TrustedFlash last September at the CTIA Wireless tradeshow in San Francisco

Tags: CES, maxtor, Sandisk