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Industry leaders join push for home media networks

Chip and electronics makers Intel (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research), Infineon (IFXGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research), Texas Instruments (TXN.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Panasonic (6752.T: Quote, Profile, Research) have formed an alliance to promote home networks for movies, music and pictures using domestic wiring. The four leading chip and electronics makers will help market and test a standard to wire together computers, TVs and entertainment systems using electricity, phone and coaxial cable lines that already exist in most homes, they said on Tuesday.

They hope the first products using the new standard will be on the market in about a year. Consumer electronics and computer makers have long talked of the so-called digital home, in which entertainment appliances and PCs are linked and typically controlled from the computer, making it easy to share digital media content between devices. But a lack of common standards between makers of these devices has held back progress. There is already a common wireless standard to link home devices using Wi-Fi. Wired networks often have the advantage of being more stable and having more capacity, and the building blocks for the infrastructure already exist in most homes.

Reuters Technology News

Posted by | Wed, Apr 30, 2008 - 01:54 AM