Inter-Device Wireless Home Network

Inter-device wireless home network

What is the trend?

For one example first, the TV and PC were once bitter enemies, at least from the industry's point of view - until as recently a few years ago, Intel and Microsoft enjoyed regular squabbles with the consumer-electronics industry. But consumers still faced the question: Computer or TV? Nowadays, the answer is increasingly becoming: "both". The PC now makes an excellent video source-device for the living-room screen - and, conversely, customers can also receive TV programs on their PCs. The devices no longer compete, and, instead, form a powerful team.

You have a PC and digital printer in your office, along with a network attached storage device. And you've copied all your music onto your portable music player. How to link these devices together without moving around? The trend is that wireless synchronization between media devices such as smartphones, PC's, hard drives, stereo amplifiers, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions.

DLNA

DLNA is short for Digital Living Network Alliance, and defines a standard for moving movies, photos, music and other media from device to device. DLNA servers can store media in one location and, without any setup or configuration, can stream the media to DLNA compliant players. The big draw behind DLNA is to throw away major configuration, and create a simplistic way for consumers to get media from one device to another. Growth of DLNA can be attributed to drastic, functional diversification of media devices today, cloud-based content streaming and widespread WLAN/ Bluetooth availability.

This means that devices that used to be dedicated to specific functions e.g. Blu-ray players, digital cameras, TVs and mobile phones can increasingly perform a similar variety of media programming such as video playback, photo