Entertainment Drives Home Technology
N E W Y O R K, Oct. 17 -- Ask anyone who's going through the process of building a first home network and they'll probably tell you they're doing it because of their job or to help the kids with their homework.
But let's face it, the only thing that will really sell consumers on the idea of stringing category-five Ethernet cable around their baseboards is better entertainment.
As of June, some 6.3 million American homes have already gone to the trouble of building a home network, according to Scottsdale, Ariz.-based research firm InStat/MDR.
And another research outfit, Parks Associates of Dallas, says that next year one-third of all new homes built in the U.S. will contain some kind of structured wiring built into the infrastructure of the house suitable for networking.
Entertainment is the third-most cited reason that homeowners want it, behind computer networking and home security.
New homeowners want the expensive stereo systems they have assembled so conscientiously for optimal sound in the living room to reach other rooms of the house and even the back yard.
"We're doing a lot of audio systems these days," says Louis Calone, who installs home networks on Long Island, N.Y.
Multiplex in the Living Room
Broader concepts of a home entertainment network are still struggling to emerge.
The most interesting ones involve distributing video to multiple screens.
The device that had the biggest buzz at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January was the Moxi Media Center, the newest gadget from WebTV founder Steve Perlman.
The plan was to sell a TV set top to cable operators with a hard drive for recording TV programming (think TiVo) and with support for both hard-wired and wireless networking to send that programming to screens all over the house.
The box is still around, though the company isn't. At the end of March it merged with a Seattle-based outfit called iTV to become a company called Digeo. It has backing from Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures, AOL Time Warner, Cisco Systems and The Washington Post Company, among others.
