The Battle for the Digital Home: Does Apple or Microsoft win?

It is very refreshing to see someone actually step up and define the digital home. I get the feeling that not too many executives have nto defined what the digital home is and then taking a step back and figuring out how they are going to get there. The destination is clear, even if a old news hack like me can jot a few ideas down from time to time, anyone can do it. Its the journey that is going to take some effort. Frankly, it looks like the companies are all starting out at base camp with a Lego set to get up Mount Everest.

This is clear headed article on the whats going on in the trenches.

From the article:

Right now we get most of our video off of cable, and then many of us use PVRs to
time shift that media so we can consume it when we want. But with Internet TV,
we can download what we want when we want it, if we have a big enough pipe into
the home. That pipe is coming, and with enough bandwidth we may not need any of
the hardware-based solutions we are currently anticipating.

One of those
new hardware solutions is a Media Server. This product sits centrally in the
home and stores everything you might want to consume in one place (hopefully,
one very secure place); it also allows you to access this media from anyplace
you have a network connection. The best I’ve seen so far is a product called the
HD
Codex, an impressive, but expensive offering that sets the bar for this
class.