Home networks move to the living room

Walking through the numerous exhibits at the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I kept thinking about all the phone calls I'm going to get from family, friends and neighbors asking me to help hook up their home networks.

If you've ever gotten one of these requests because of your network knowledge, get ready for a slew of new phone calls. Not only will your friends want you to network their computers, they're also going to ask you to network their TVs, stereos and refrigerators.

One recurring theme from the show is that everything in the home will soon be networked. According to many vendors, the digital center of the consumer universe will soon be moving from the office, where the PC sits, into the living room, where the home entertainment system sits.

Witness the new set-top box from Moxi (www.moxi.com). The Moxi Media Center (get ready for the acronym MC) is a combination of a digital set-top box, video and music jukebox, personal video recorder (like TiVo and ReplayTV), and an Internet gateway and firewall that hooks up to a broadband connection. The content that comes in (via satellite or cable) will then be able to be streamed (via wires or wireless) to other Moxi devices connected to TVs or to other PCs in the house. The Media Center also has a CD/DVD player that can store the music digitally on its 80G-byte hard drive (it can also store video content). Don't rush out to buy it just yet, as Moxi is only selling the Media Center to satellite providers and cable system operators, who will then likely let you lease or buy the box.

In this new world of the connected living room, the home PC becomes a peripheral that connects to the living room's media center. Or you could say the Moxi acts like a server to which all your other desktop PCs (or other TVs in the house or your stereo system) connect as clients.

The Moxi is just the latest entrant in this movement - other companies also are trying to accomplish this. SonicBlue's new ReplayTV 4000 adds a broadband port for downloading content, and Vialta's ViDVD player is a DVD player that plays MP3 files and CDs; connects to the Internet; views digital photos; and plays karaoke CDs. Microsoft's Ultimate TV and TiVo's new products only crowd the field a bit more. Recordable DVD players that let you put all your home videos on a new DVD format also will get you moving away from the office and into the living room.

For those of us back in the PC world, there are still many vendors that want to help consumers connect all their computers. Prices on 802.11b (WiFi) networks have reached the point where more consumers are trying this option to connect two or more computers without running Cat-5 cables all over the place. With wireless, a home user can leave his PC in the office and connect to the Internet on a laptop in his living room (that's another way to move computing to the living room).

And for users who haven't tried wireless networking yet, there are vendors with power-line and phone-line networking products that are finally hitting the marketplace. And in case you wanted to move all your digital content to the kitchen, there's Icebox (www.iceboxllc.com), an "under the cabinet" box that lets you surf the Web, monitor Web cameras and listen to digital audio files from your kitchen.

Of course, vendors say creating the networked home will be very simple, but we know better. So get ready for the phone calls from your friends and family, and make sure you know the difference between an RCA cable and a composite video cable.

Note: I saw so many new products and technologies at CES that there's not enough space here to write about it all. So go to www.nwfusion.com, DocFinder 7735, to find my exclusive Web coverage of the show.

Send any Cool Tools info to kshaw@nww.com.