Digital Hubbub – IEEE Spectrum

The hub as factotum

Whatever their genesis, the functions that the digital hubs provide are similar. Virtually all will record video and audio and store still photos from various sources, including your personal CD library, broadcast TV, and the Internet. They will also be able to store and play video games. And they will organize all your media files in an easy-to-browse fashion and play them back on demand, making available such features as pause, rewind, and several varieties of skip and fast-forward.

Typically, a hub might incorporate a high-capacity hard-disk drive, a CD/DVD player, a TV tuner, and inputs for digital cameras, digital video, and broadband digital data. Add a cable or digital subscriber line (DSL) modem on the front end of the hub, and the package is fairly complete. Generally the user interface would be a file browser like that of a PC desktop, modified for a TV screen, and a remote control.

On the output side, a digital hub would serve audio and video to every TV set, computer, and stereo in your home. This would require a wired—or preferably wireless—network, with cheap receivers scattered around the house to capture the digital signals and return them to analog form. (Wireless network receivers for PCs currently run under US $100 each, but hub makers would like to halve that figure.)

What does it take to perform all its functions? Inside, a hub may look much like an oddball PC from the last decade: a 32-bit CPU ticking over at a few hundred megahertz, with some multiple of 8MB of RAM, a video interface, and a digital signal-processing (DSP) chip or two to compress and decompress the video and transform the stored data into a format for display [see “Under the Hood,”]. It will also need 20GB of disk space and up, as good video requires about a gigabyte an hour, and audio needs about a megabyte a minute. (Once you have the CPU and DSP chips for encoding and decoding the streams of digital video compressed for broadcast or storage on a DVD, most of the other functions of a home entertainment gateway, including the user interface and music storage, are close to free.)

It will be the task of the designers to assemble a product that might have cost about $2000 five years ago but that today goes for between $250 and $500. That price would make it comparable to the cost of a typical new cable or satellite box.

Companies that currently have the most concrete plans for digital hubs range from electronics giants like Pioneer and Motorola to start-ups like Moxi Digital or established niche players like Metro Link and Cirrus Logic. (The latter two are offering “reference designs” for those who want to manufacture digital hubs using their chips and software.) Even IBM has a chipset it will be offering for a set-top box.

Moxi Digital (Palo Alto, Calif.) demonstrated what it called its media center hub at January’s Consumer Electronics Show. It has a PVR, a CD/DVD player, innovative user-interface software, and a wireless home entertainment distribution network. In February, Digeo Inc. (Kirkland, Wash.), a start-up controlled by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, announced plans to build a strikingly similar hub in partnership with Motorola Inc. (Schaumburg, Ill.) and cable company Charter Communications Inc. (St. Louis, Mo.), also controlled by Allen. In March, Moxi and Digeo merged and took on the Digeo name.

The merged company intends to roll out Moxi’s software on Motorola’s set-top box hardware; it is also moving forward with tests of Moxi media center prototypes among subscribers to Echostar Communications Corp. (Littleton, Colo.), a satellite TV service. Established makers of set-top boxes, including Royal Philips Electronics (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) and Pioneer Corp. (Tokyo)—and, of course, Motorola—are building boxes that include high-speed data connections and home-network capabilities, in addition to the digital TV decoders of ordinary cable systems. Pioneer, for one, says its Digital Library unit will be able to store video, audio, and photos; download indexing information for music files automatically from the Internet; and serve multiple streams of audio and video throughout a user’s home.

While the January Consumer Electronics Show saw companies in the PC business like Apple Computer Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.) and Microsoft gain the most press attention for their digital hubs, their plans appear to be the least well developed. Microsoft made headlines for a conceptual hub system built around a gateway computer and wireless Web-pad displays. Named Mira, the displays, which can show text or video and also act as remote controls, would be linked by the company’s new Freestyle software modules to control plug-and-play entertainment units like DVDs, stereos, or home theatre installations, as well as home security system and lighting.