What is Broadband?
Internet broadband data is the work horse for modern day home entertainment options. It’s also a potential bottleneck in adoption of the online digital entertainment.
Reason is that broadband data requires a wire into your home. Right now, only your local cable company and local telephone company control this access into your home. Guess what? They’re not giving away usage of either for free. Fortunately, there are two options for internet data instead of just one.
Wireless broadband data has become faster and more reliable. Wireless also has a limited resource involving licenses – the “airwaves” are not free. Recent providers have reduced their options for unlimited wireless usage plans. Indications that their wireless data is not unlimited.
Entertainment Content Providers
For most homes the entertainment content providers are the same as their internet broadband providers. The least expensive and most efficient way of getting electronic content into your home is via your broadband connection – i.e. the “workhorse”.
More recently, entertainment content, especially movies and past television series episodes have been made available thru other online websites. Many of these alternate providers are free or minimal cost. This gives users the choice of viewing and paying for only the content they want instead of an entire lineup of channels from your local cable company.
Offline content needs to be considered also as DVD’s can be purchased and will need to be uploaded to the home server for sharing. Personal photos and videos is another example of offline media.
Providers for content other than entertainment are increasing – namely home automation and security providers. Naturally, your local cable and telephone providers are working hard to break into this market. The market potential is huge.
Your Home Network
A home network has the capability to transmit and receive Ethernet data throughout your home to and from different network connected devices. Ethernet has become the standard for modern day networks which requires different wiring and transmission devices than your standard electrical devices. It’s also more advanced that standard telephone cabling and different than cable TV. A high speed home network forms the basis of your whole house entertainment system.
Managing Your Backups
Managing home network backups is a task most people would rather not think about. With the rapid growth of inexpensive disk storage technology in home computers, the amount of data to be backed up has grown considerably.
Wireless Network
Home wireless networks have made great advances in recent years. With the new 802.11n standard, broadband speeds have approached those as fast as many home wired networks. Overall, wireless networks for home owners are simple and easy to setup. In most cases plug-in-play.
What is Home Entertainment?
One of the goals of a digital home is distributing your home entertainment to all of the electronic devices in your home which are capable of playing it, without extra cost.
If you have a good movie recorded, then you should be able to watch on any of your televisions, computers and mobile devices. Likewise, any personal pictures and video movies should also be available on all of your devices.
If your home network is connected to your local cable provider, then in addition to watching cable channel s you should have the option to watch online media content via the internet.
Basically, what you should be able to do is watch any of your entertainment content on any of your media devices.
What is Home Security?
Another goal in the new digital home is to be able to monitor the security of your home. This could include multiple cameras, also sensor type devices on your doors and windows. It could also include temperature notifications in the event your home furnace or air conditioner stops working properly. Also, digital home security includes smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms and any other digitally connected security devices.
One of the goals for automating your home security is to be able to do all of your security remotely using your portable devices providing convenience with no time wasted.
What is Home Automation?
Another goal for your digital home is home automation. This could include any number of devices which are still making their way into your home.
Examples would include monitoring and controlling your home’s thermostat, lighting controls, underground sprinklers.
A big concern in today’s “green environment” is monitoring usage of energy. As electrical and other energy devices become smarter they will be connected into your home network where you will have the ability to monitor their energy usage and be able to control that usage from any of your network connected devices – including remote control on your portable devices.
What are Interoperability Guidelines?
As the number of home digital devices grow, making sure they are all compatible with each other can become a major concern. Your TV need to work with your computers and the rest of your network. The sensors on your electrical devices need to communicate with newer versions of monitoring devices and software. You can’t start a home automation network today, and then later find out that it’s completely obsolete.
Guidelines need to be established by groups of hardware and software manufactures to keep different devices working with each other.
