Home Storage

Home Storage

Introduction

While most of us enjoy creating and collecting digital photos, videos and music, many people are discouraged by the complex challenge of accessing, moving, organizing, backing-up, reformatting and annotating their multi-gigabyte digital media libraries. Adding to the complexity is the increasing propensity in many homes to spread these media libraries across an ever broadening spectrum of storage-capable consumer electronics products and PCs. These products have different capabilities and interfaces, and users have no simple way to move, protect or access all the 'stuff' stored across these multiple devices.

Statement Of The Problem

Among its many other capabilities, the Intel Media Processor CE 3100 can manage video from multiple sources, including CE devices and PCs connected over home networks. The perfect complement to these capabilities is the ability to enjoy seamless access to personal media stored on different CE devices in the home. On the TV, the experience should be as easy as selecting a favorite channel, regardless of where media is actually stored. On the PC, the experience should be as easy as accessing media files from the local drive. Intel's research confirms that providing easy, consistent and intuitive access to media storage around the home is something that people clearly value.

Whole Home Storage is a technology solution under exploration at Intel with the goal of meeting these objectives. By bringing together all media stored within the home, this technology is expected to enable even the most non-technical people to enjoy a new set of media experiences no matter where the media is stored.

Some people are already finding ways to do these things, but without the ease of use provided by an explicit whole home storage capability, the ad-hoc setups are unnecessarily complex and limited. The key to a successful solution is the ability to deliver ...