There is no lovelier time or place than a balmy evening on the Stanford campus in the middle of August. The stars are out, the palm trees sway quietly in the moonlight, and all is right with the world.

Why would anyone squander a chance to be out there enjoying that ambience to spend time, instead, inside the funky confines of Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium – an aging dowager of a building, better known as Mem Aud – when the evening breezes are calling?

The folks who attend this conference – this year’s was the 18^th rendition – are so immersed in their topic material, and the general conviviality of their brotherhood, they apparently are happy to bypass a starry night to be together in Mem Aud for further discussion and discourse over the latest and greatest ICs in the world. It’s not enough that they’re in there all day attending the conference; it would appear they want to be in there all evening, as well.

Topics over the two-day event included microprocessors, memory, parallel processing, reconfigurable computing, embedded processors, multi-core processors, and yet more microprocessors. Most of these presentations were delivered by senior technologist from some of the world’s heaviest hitters in the semiconductor world – Philips, Intel, AMD, Toshiba, Xilinx, MIPS, ARM, IBM, and Sun.

Monday night’s session – the one that trumped the starry night – was a panel discussion entitled: Who Owns the Living Room?

It was moderated by Jan-Willem Van de Waerdt from Philips, and included 6 speakers who all had 5 minutes, give or take, to get their in their 2-cents, before Van de Waerdt opened the floor for questions. I’m going to detail the comments from each of these speakers in order, and then leave the Q&A to your imagination, because once these guys were done with the formal part of their presentations, I skedaddled out of there. It was 9 o’clock and the starry Stanford night called.

Jan-Willem Van de Waerdt introduced the topic and the panel with the odd and politically-incorrect comment that there is no question as to who owns the living: His wife owns the living room. The overwhelmingly male audience chuckled mildly.

Glen Stone from Sony, the first panelist, countered that it’s the mortgage broker who actually owns the living room. The audience gave up a bigger chuckle over that one. Getting serious, Stone said the living room clearly belongs to the consumer and the consumer’s content – and it’s a situation that’s not restricted to the living room.

He said broadcast content, broadband content, DVD content, and mobile-space content are all vying for attention across the consumer electronics smorgasbord that includes PCs, mobile phones, TVs, DVD players, and so forth.

Stone then was the first, but not the only, speaker to invoke the DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) Technical Committee as an entity that’s offering hope-against-hope that order can be brought to the chaos of content providers and content receivers; DLNA wants to develop and support a framework for open standards across digital media and digital content.

If DLNA succeeds as planned, per Stone, consumer electronics will not have just one owner – not just a single, uber-vendor for the devices involved – because the cost of content, ease of acquisition of content, the flexibility of that content, and the range of vendors providing content and hardware, will be as appealing as possible for the consumers who want and need it.

Glen Stone concluded his comments by enumerating the various issues – device interoperability, service and support, quality of service, DRM (Digital Rights Management) interoperability, and Hollywood’s deathly fear of content going out on the Internet – that all remain in flux at the moment. Issues, he reiterated, that must be resolved to full figure out Who Owns the Living Room.

Eugene Shteyn from Philips was up next. He said that digital entertainment services are owned by the couch potatoes through their access to cable TV and DVDs. Meanwhile, he said, there’s a "revolution" going on outside of the living room which includes blogs, social networks, vlogs, online shopping, and so on – and this "revolution" is playing itself out on a host of new contraptions including mobile phones, portable audio and video devices, HDTVs, and media-enabled PCs.

Shteyn said that everything from broadband, to WiFi – both LANs and WANs, and 3G mobile standards are offering a huge number of business and technical opportunities to those who can jump on them.

He said what’s emerging today is something like a World Wide Living Room – a phenomenon that’s actually owned by a much larger population group than just the traditional couch potatoes. And this larger group, per Shteyn, wants bandwidth, reliability, interoperability across forums, DRM, and ease of set up – right away.

Again, he reiterated, there are plenty of growth opportunities here – everything from retooling the infrastructure, to solving storage and format mismatches, to the packaging and delivery of digital content, and the providing of new and innovative user experiences. The World Wide Living Room is wide open, Shteyn said, to owners, device companies, and content providers who can trade on the benefits of co-opetition.

Bob Brummer from Microsoft took the podium next, which caused me to sit up in my chair and stop gazing out the open doors of Mem Aud to the balmy evening beyond. I’m rarely in a space where Microsoft is on stage, and this promised to be fun.

Brummer told the audience that he is the director of the Digital and Entertainment Division at Microsoft. Then he said, "Microsoft is in the living room." (Wow – that felt kinda creepy.) He went on to say that interoperability is important and innovation must be on top. He explained that there are currently no monolithic programs at Microsoft – there are Xbox programs, media center programs, IPTV programs, and so forth, but Microsoft is still in a learning mode as to how to make the entire digital experience easier for the consumer. (Okay – feeling better.)

Brummer said that Dell and HP have products with Microsoft inside, but those products are as much about Dell and HP as they are about Microsoft. He said those products are also about living rooms, and sharing content across all of the different rooms in the house. People are not buying products, he said, to just use locally; they’re buying them in hopes of linking them up and, therefore, we must work together as an industry to make that vision a reality. (Alrightie, then – Andiamo!)

Alan Messer from Samsung was next. He started by commending the DLNA efforts. He said the outcome of such efforts would be a realization of the "dream" of the connected home. He had a slide that showed the home network in the middle of a digital solar system comprised of the PC, the mobile phone, the digital camera, the TV, the broadband network, and so forth.

Messer posed the question, "Who owns this dream?" He said this question continues a classic debate that, over the years, has included OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative), HAVi (Home Audio Video interoperability), Jini (network architecture for distributed systems built on Java), and UPnP (Universal Plug-n-Play) – and is characterized today by the iPod and all the players involved in that product’s development and ongoing support.

Messer noted that telecomms today are trying to control IPTV service, while DRM efforts want to control the port. But, he warned – if any one person wins the fight to control or own "the dream," they will break the dream. He concluded by saying that the only solution for today’s digital content and device conundrums are standards – open standards. He received a hearty round of applause!

Bill Curtis from Dell stepped to the podium and told the audience that they own their own consumer electronic equipment, but Dell has to comply with standards and be aware of all of the issues discussed, up to that point, in the electronics that his company sells. He said Dell knows that convergence across the industry must include protection of copyrighted content, and that progressively high standards are important to implement.

Curtis said that the move from VHS content, to DVD content, to digital cable/satellite content, to Blu-ray disc content, has required increasingly stringent attention to copyright standards. He added that the TV and movie studios are increasing their efforts to prevent unauthorized re-distribution of premium content, but also noted that content protection in the digital age is an extremely complex proposition.

He enumerated various types of content protection schemes – including the "secure interoperability" of MP3, MPEG2, MPEG4 content – while lamenting the fact that, currently there are 13 different output protection formats being supported by the FCC. Curtis recommended the industry move to a standardized content protection method, and commended the DLNA for its recent adoption of the DTCP-IP standard (Digital Transmission Content Protection). He also suggested further work on encryption schemes at the silicon level, and an overall simplification of the situation.

Curtis concluded, "Don’t add any more!" He was referring to protection schemes, and got a big round of applause.

Professor Hisafumi Yamada from Kyushu Institute of Technology was second to last among the panelists. He was allowed to speak longer than the others, because per Jan-Willem Van de Waerdt, Yamada is from academia and therefore free of company bias. That said, Yamada did spend 34 years at Sony before retreating to the Ivory Tower at the Kyushu Institute, but clearly his is a scholar’s approach these days.

Yamada said the key to success is to examine the process: Standards lead to competition, which lead to improved consumer products, which lead to more sales, which lead to more content, which lead to a better situation for the consumer. He said that if TV standards differ from state to state, or country to country, nobody wins. He advised the industry to move to a state of minimum DRM because content creators want more, not less, people to see their products – that the industry should not lose out on big business opportunities by looking at DRM systems that may be beautiful, but prevent distribution. "Different country codes just make customers unhappy," he said.

Yamada went on to recommend a re-consideration of the PC as an audio-visual appliance. He characterized the TV as being an appliance for vision and sound, designed for looking at content made by others, and one that comes with a simple user interface. Alternatively, Yamada characterized the PC as a device that provides tools for creating solutions that may include vision and sound. He said the PC is also an input device, and are also gaming devices. He said a PC, if paired with a TV, can help consumers watch the content they themselves have created, while still providing PC capabilities and a gaming machine.

Yamada had a slide: It illustrated a PC that provided an IP phone, a TV and gaming console, an archiving device for entertainment content, and a machine for working with conventional applications like Word and PowerPoint. He argued that it’s the PC that should be seen as the long-term audio-visual appliance, and concluded: "The consumer owns the living room, so make them feel happy."

Yamada said the consumer will be happy if the device they use is fun, convenient, and a quality product that provides all of the features they’re looking for. He ended: "New FUNction is the killer app."

"You do!"

The Internet may be changing entertainment, Akiyama argued, but it’s a big, new frontier and there are explosive changes in the entire digital entertainment area. He said people want to extend the notion of entertainment to include PCs, portable devices, and a host of other electronic media. After further comments along these lines, he closed with an overt plug for his employer:

Company plug, or no, Akiyama’s punch line was the perfect summation of everything that everybody had been saying over the previous hour. It was also the perfect segue to my departure.

I left the hot chip enthusiasts to their lively Q&A and slipped out through the side door of Mem Aud into the dark, sultry Stanford night. The stars were silent, the moon as well, and even if, at that moment, everyone in the world was connected into their digital, DLNA-enabled reality – no one in the celestial sphere seemed to notice or care.

Per the DLNA website: "DLNA aligns industry leaders in the CE, mobile, and PC industries through digital interoperability. DLNA encourages companies involved in all these areas to join and participate in the DLNA. The DLNA CERTIFIED™ Product Page is available to provide specific information on our Member's products that have passed our interoperability testing standards. The page is designed to provide quick access to posted products by company or product category. The information posted includes product descriptions and web site links for additional details."

Print Version

September 4, 2006

Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com

Copyright (c) 2006, Peggy Aycinena. All rights reserved.