Digital Home: “Huge Hype”

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Like much else, when The Economist writes, you read…like this very good and detailed story analyzing the hype around “digital home”, a concept and category hugely hyped in executive circles but still rarely heard in discussions among consumers.

Their first challenge in stimulating any sort of consumer interest is the difficulty of merely explaining what the digital home is supposed to be…it is not the digital conversion of analog media. Instead, the industry palyers invariably mean a home in which all sorts of home electronic devices are connected, both to one another and to the internet.

The excitement, therefore, is not so much about content being digital, but about its delivery switching from physical things (such as CDs) to photons (such as wireless downloads or streaming), because this requires consumers to buy new gadgets.

The article also goes into lack of interporability, on all levels of the value chain, from file formats to DRM to codecs.

For the foreseeable future, the only certainty is that all these mighty companies will continue to preach interoperability while pursuing proprietary hegemony.

Anyway, read this one in full…

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