Entelligence: The real reason for home networks

Every Thursday Michael Gartenberg of Jupiter Research contributes an interesting item of gadget-related research data. Last week he discussed mobile gaming, this week he looks at the real reason for home networks:

Over 30 million US households will have PC-centric home networks by 2008 with the tipping point of wireless over wired networks happening this year. As a result of these ubiquitous home networks, new opportunities will be created to extend the availability of interactive services for consumers. Both hardware and media companies need to immediately begin to evaluate the functionality that is created by extended connectivity in the home and focus on providing those services. You see, ultimately, it is not about the network technologies that will drive home network adoption but rather the services and applications that consumers can now gain access to and implement.

Consumers with home networks have an overwhelming propensity to want to take advantage of the functionality offered by their networks. And it's not just about sharing that broadband Internet connection. While shared internet access is a priority among 26% of the population, listening to music stored on a PC and streamed to a stereo, home automation and streaming video content to a TV set all rank in higher priority for consumers. JupiterResearch believes that this will lead to a number of opportunities for vendors to capitalize on this desire and focus on devices and software applications that can seamlessly plug into the home network and facilitate these feature sets. Good examples are
TiVo's Home Media Option,
Windows XP Media Center Edition and
Media Center Extender, Apple's
Airport Express and a host of devices from other firms which offer connections for wired and wireless networks to deliver desired consumer level functionality. The Achilles heel in all this is that the weak point is still the networks. They remain too hard to use, configure and get connected to all the other devices. The vendors that solve this first, will be the vendors who own this space.