Merlin Kister of Intel Shares his Views on IPTV and the Wider Networked Home Market  

Consumers in the future will have the choice of multiple devices in the home, and IPTV may be one of them. They will also be able to connect out to other devices, whether it be a PC with media centre, or a hand-held device that you get content to.

There may be some sort of connectivity path that a consumer can get, with the content that comes down through IPTV, and then have the ability to send it through the home. It may be through the PC or some other method, but we have to look at it, as there will be multiple choices. How do we make the best of these choices, and how do we drive that connectivity?

I  think you need to look at it (IPTV) as one of the devices in the home. There is going to be compelling content that will come down that pipe line that people will want to have with them on other devices.

The questions are still there. How do I make that occur, how do I get that IPTV networked to other devices? How do I work with those service providers to that network to occur because remember they could say "no I don’t want that network to take place" or they can work through the digital rights management, or "how this is going to be put through?" It’s quite a complex challenge. It’s a challenge that I think this industry is up for. We have done complex things before, here we just have a lot of new players getting involved with us for the first time.

From Intel’s perspective it’s been quite interesting during this whole digital home initiative. For the digital home, we had to go out and talk to people we had not dealt with before, the content owners, the content service providers, to get them to feel comfortable with a PC this is very fundamentally different.

It’s great to work with our standard cast of characters who we work with on devices, but its another thing to work with the large CE manufacturers and say we want these things to work together so I want my DVD recorder to connect back with my PC. This has been very interesting for us, and a fun challenge. It’s been great to see the pieces come together to make that vision a reality.

Do you think that consumers appetite is there for connected devices?

I think consumers are already demanding connectivity. Consumers have had a taste of these type of devices and the expectation has been set. Now they are asking the next question "why can’t I get the content onto my other devices? The consumer wants that functionality throughout the home, and to be able to take it to other devices in and out of the home. How can this sort of connectivity be facilitated?

How do we make that, and how do we facilitate that as an industry, not only for an IPTV perspective, but also from a service providers and device perspective of "how we get these to communicate with each other?"