Connecting The Digital Home

That was the message 17 technology vendors delivered this week in forming the Digital Home Working Group (DHWG), a nonprofit, cross-industry organization that aims to spur interoperability between IT, consumer electronics and mobile devices.

The group's members include Intel, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Panasonic/Matsushita Electric, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Nokia, Fujitsu, Gateway, Kenwood, Lenovo, NEC CustomTechnica, STMicroelectronics and Thomson. Their goal: Establish an interoperability platform based on open industry standards and technical design guidelines so companies can create products that let users easily share digital content over wired or wireless home networks. Those products range from PCs, TVs, set-top boxes and mobile phones to printers, stereos, PDAs, DVD players, digital projectors and other devices.

At the DHWG launch event in San Francisco Tuesday, technology visionary Paul Saffo said the group lays the groundwork for the rise of the so-called digital home.

"Once upon a time, all of our digital devices were islands," said Saffo, director of the Institute For The Future, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based think tank. "In the early '80s, there was the computer island and the TV island. And then starting in the late '80s and early '90s, the islands became archipelagos. There was stuff clustering around the computer, stuff clustering around the TV in our living rooms and increasingly stuff clustered around mobile devices. And it's really clear where that's going to go. Now the archipelagos are about to become ecologies, [where] everything works together and talks together."

Although some product interoperability and industry standards already exist for home networking, they've fallen short in making things easy for consumers, said Louis Burns, vice president and co-general manager of the Desktop Platforms Group at Intel. Research shows that many consumers find home networks difficult to set up, largely because not all devices always work together, he said.

"Home networking has grown dramatically in the last few years and continues to accelerate, but it is not without issues," Burns said. "Interoperability is a must. Proprietary solutions really have no impact on creating new categories. It really takes an industry--in this case, multiple industries coming together--to create interoperable standards and frameworks.

"Simply stated, we want the ability for consumers--on whatever device they choose--to access the content they want in the fashion they want and how they want," Burns said.

Besides devising an interoperability road map, the DHWG aims to provide a baseline for media formats and drive market acceptance of home networking products and technologies through compliance and verification testing. Plans call for the group to deliver certification, a compliance logo, marketing and promotional programs to members over the next year, with the first DHWG-compliant products due out at the tail end of that time frame.

The framework envisioned by the DHWG designates protocols for networking such as IP, Ethernet and Wi-Fi; device discovery and control such as UPnP; and media transport such as HTTP, as well as preferred formats for audio and visual media such as JPEG, PNG, LPCM and MPEG-2. Optional media formats--including MP3, GIF, TIFF, WMA9 and MPEG-4--will be supported as well. Down the road, the group also may address digital rights management and content protection technologies.

"We're not creating standards ourselves," said Scott Smyers, DHWG chairman and vice president of the Network & Systems Architecture Division at Sony. "We're going to be referring to [industry] standards and [the DHWG] guidelines and sort of narrowing down the available options so the products that manufacturers build make the same set of decisions on how to perform a given functionality."

The DHWG plans to publish its first guidelines in the fourth quarter, Smyers said. Product interoperability testing is slated to begin in the first half of 2004, with the first DHWG-logo products and marketing programs following in the second half of 2004, he said.

"We realize it's difficult to market products when the advantages that were advertised are very hard to realize," Smyers said. "So we share a common goal and approach to make the home network transparent. That means you're not having the home network in the way but are interacting with the content."