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Connecting with content
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05/05/2005
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A trip to an electronics store is a good way to get a ‘reality check’ as to the value of a wired or wireless network connection. It seems that Ethernet network interface cards are now cheap enough to be given away to people who send in three cereal packet tops. In the US, a PCI based IEEE802.11b compatible wireless lan card is available for less than $10.
So, given this background, this article tries to answer two questions. Firstly, what are the factors that are holding back the deployment of digital networks for sharing rich multimedia content in certain applications? Secondly, what is likely to occur in the coming years that may cause this situation to change?
This is not to say that digital networks are not used to transmit video today –clearly, they are. However, there are applications where migration to the use of digital networks has been significantly slower than many imagined. As an example, most in car entertainment systems use analogue wiring to connect the rear seat display to the DVD player, despite the higher cost of this cabling compared with other approaches.
One of the primary challenges relates to concerns about how easy it is to access content once it is in the digital domain. Much has been written about the security limitations of the encryption protocol associated with early wireless networks.
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Author
Ian Ferguson
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