Today Linksys announced the purchase of Kiss Technologies, a maker of a networked DVD player designed to compete with companies/products targeting the in-home media delivery market (video on demand) like Akimbo The "networked" home is still in stage 1....the foundation laying and plumbing stage. Over the last 3-4 years, 2 major components of this plumbing have been laid - broadband connections (DSL and cable modems) and wireless (providing access to this connection from anywhere without having to lay cabling all over your house).
Now comes more plumbing hardware that will enable efficient usage of the broadband and wireless. The in-home media is at the same stage today as Wi-Fi was around 2001. It's hard to read technology news without reference to Windows Media Player/Hardware Edition, the Mac Mini - which I'm convinced is Apple's prelude to a consumer friendly mass market in-home digital hardware server (Music, Photo's, Video) - or anything Open Source/Linux based.
Now that Linksys has Cisco's investment powder, look for even newer consumer friendly all-in-one Home Media Servers. It's going to be a very short time before we start seeing Linksys' latest and greatest All-In-One Device of Wireless, Voice-Over-IP, and now a DVD/Music Player with a large harddrive.
We'll all be asking ourselves very shortly how we could use such a device and then we'll be asking our ultra geek friends how it works and within a few years, these kind of Home Media Servers will be proliferating our homes and serving up all our digital content (Music, Photo's, Movies) to any device we want (our TV's, our laptops, etc)
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Linksys to buy consumer electronics start-up
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