For a market that hasn't seen a lot of sales as of yet, the home media server/hub space is bustling with activity.

These next generation devices are designed to be the center of the digital home, organizing and networking audio and video and providing intelligent functions, such as the time shifting and automatic recording available with a personal video recorder.

And companies are coming at the market from many different angles – from next generation set top boxes to "entertainment" PCs to enhanced personal video recorders to entirely new devices– all looking to get a piece of the action, even though most observers agree that the action won't really arrive in earnest until 2006.

It's a market at the Wild West stage of development with lots of players and no rules.

"The end result is consumers are very confused," said Connie Wong, a senior analyst at Semico. "There isn't a standard name for this. There are all sorts of different names -- media hub, media server…"

"And the price points are significantly different because all have different capabilities," she said. "Some handle some media formats, some handle a lot of media formats. They have different sized hard disks. And the price points are all over the place from low end to high end depending on capability."

Just what are these devices?  Analyst firm InStat defines a media server as a device with a hard drive, a broadband connection and in-home networking capability.  Some analysts choose a more liberal definition that does not include a broadband connection.

Still, people have started to buy the devices, in spite of the confusion. By the end of this holiday season, just over one million entertainment PCs will have shipped, a drop in the bucket compared to overall PC sales, said Mike Paxton, senior analyst for converging markets and technologies at InStat. And that million shipped as of this holiday season is nothing considering the devices have been available since 2002.

"The price difference between media server PCs and a more basic PC is an extra $300 to $400 for those additional capabilities," he said.  The PCs are among some of the most expensive devices that fit the category.

Consumers may also be confused by all the different media format technologies in the market today.

"We are still in the emerging stages of this market definitely," she said.

Paxton believes we are in the first year of a two-year long experimentation cycle.  But, he says, the opportunity for semiconductor companies is very attractive.

"You are looking at a lot of processing power and a lot of memory," he said. "Devices will need processor modules, tuner modules, MPEG chip sets, wireless chipsets, networking chipsets…"

By: DocMemory
Copyright © 2023 CST, Inc. All Rights Reserved