* Report from the Digital Living Room conference
Last week, Larry had a chance to lead a panel discussion on voice over IP at the Digital Living Room conference in Foster City, Calif. Larry’s VoIP panel was (as always) engaging, but the most eye-popping and ear-splitting aspects of the conference centered around digital products and services that integrate technology for entertainment content, telecommunications and wireless devices.
The conference, sponsored by iHollywood Forum, brought together an impressive mix of thought leaders from technology, consumer electronics, finance, Hollywood and the analyst community to discuss the technological, business and investment roadmap for the digital home.
Featured at the show were components for multimedia services, ranging from chip sets that can be built into premise-based devices, to multi-tenant multimedia service architectures, to software that provides converged services on a personal computer, laptop or server.
In one demonstration, HDTV was being provided in the home on an 802.11 wireless LAN. The picture quality and sound were every bit as good as a wireline feed. (Now if we could just figure out how to provide electricity without wires, we’d be completely cable-free.)
In other presentations and demonstrations, multimedia servers showed how a consumer can manage and control video conferences, entertainment content (games and on-demand video programming), e-mail, voice mail, telephone calls and a full range of Internet services.
The venture capital community was well represented and most attentive about these new opportunities – with good reason – the digital living room is alive and well, bringing a whole new market dimension to unified communications.
