@CES, Las Vegas – What matters most about media is how easy it is to manage and move around.
That is the animating principle behind both Cisco and Microsoft’s view of the digital home. To judge from what each company has had to show off at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, it will define competition between the two for years to come.
Cisco has been moving steadily into consumer markets for years (not least through the acquisitions of wireless router company Linksys and set top box maker Scientific Atlanta), but this year’s CES has finally brought its vision into greater focus.
Two announcements on Wednesday made the point. The first was what Cisco called its Entertainment Operating System (the significance of the name will not have been lost on Microsoft.) Aimed at media companies, this is both a back-end system, to help organise and deliver content in a world where every customer wants to control how and when they consume media, as well as a front-end piece of software, to make it easier for users to personalise their media or create social experiences around content.
Cisco’s second, more eye-catching announcement was a digital music system designed to move music around the house – the company’s first venture into the world of consumer “gadgets” (if you don’t count its routers and set top boxes.) Others, such as Sonos, already produce hardware like this, but Cisco has clearly decided that it needs full control of the end-to-end experience.
The networking company also showed off a media “hub” to act as the central storage repository for media to be moved around the home – though the lackluster sales of other home media servers suggests this market is not yet ready for prime time.
This points to Microsoft’s overwhelming advantage, at least for now: the fact that so much home media content currently resides on the PC. Its problem lies in helping users get their media off their computers and out to other devices in a simple way.
Windows 7, the next version of the operating system, may supply part of the answer. The software passed a landmark this week as it went into an official Beta version, putting it on track to hit the market before the end of this year (though Microsoft is still being coy about its planned launch date.)
Shown off to a big audience for the first time at CES, one of Windows 7′s most compelling features is called “Play to”: users are able to select from a menu on their PC to pick which devices around the home to send their media to. Behind this simple advance is support in Windows 7 of DLNA, a standard that makes it possible for different pieces of hardware on a home network to recognise each other and interoperate.
Making it easier for consumers to manage media across a home network like this is one of the biggest challenges in consumer electronics. Will Cisco’s network-centric approach or Microsoft’s PC-based view of the world provide the solution? The answer to that will go a long way to determining who has the dominant place in the digital home.
