A blog from vnunet.com covering the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) from Las Vegas
CES Blog - a blog from vnunet.com
CES Blog - a blog from vnunet.com

« HD DVD and Blu-ray perform in shotgun wedding | Main | Cebit bleeding red ink »

January 5, 2007

Microsoft home server rumors increase

As Microsoft chairman Bill Gates gets closer to opening up the Consumer Electronics Show this Sunday, rumors are increasing that he plans to unveil some kind of home media server and storage appliance.

Img_8503_1_2 Details are extremely hard to come by, but the appliance will allegedly offer central storage and for digital media, and stream it to devices throughout the home. Think some shoebox that you set up once and than had in the meter closet or under the sofa.

As our digital media library are expanding beyond digital photos and mp3 to include TV recordings and digital home videos, the need to access that information in an way that is easy to use will further increase. A home media server would be one way to solve that issue.

But other parties will no doubt insist that adding more hard drives and CPUs to the home is the wrong solution for this problem. Cisco in particular is bound to point out that you can simply stream all this information over the network (in the process allowing Cisco to sell more routers).

Tech savvy consumers however will be disappointed by a hosted solution that has limited flexibility. A box that gets warm and that they can pet is the perfect solution.

But that is, of course, provided that the rumors are true.

Yellowmachine_1
Anthology's Yellow Machine made an attempt at launching a home media server, but few paid attention.

Technorati technorati tags: , , , , , , ,

Comments

the comments to this entry are closed.