"The digital home is not a distant reality for India. Broadband penetration is increasing and with the government's goals of getting more broadband in by 2010, we will have the connectivity that will make the digital home possible," said Narendra Bhandari, part of Intel's digital home initiative and software relations group across APAC.
He was speaking during the first day of Intel's Developer Forum, held in Bangalore on Tuesday which was not only about Intel's India plans but covered the larger arena of future technologies that Intel will be working on.
Content was also not a problem as "India already has a unique place in Asia with its Bollywood set of movies. While this is the biggest in the world with over 67,000 films so far, what is noteworthy is that these movies are adjusting to new mediums. With connectivity and content in place, there is not much else that India will need to go the digital home way," Bhandari added.
"Imagine this. You are at home, watching a movie on TV. And suddenly you feel like seeing digital photos of your kids taken some time back and residing in the PC hard disk in your bedroom. You just use your remote to switch from the TV channel to your PC's hard disk to retrieve the pictures. Take a look and then return to your movie. And that is just the beginning of what digital homes can offer you," said an enthusiastic Rakesh Godhwani, part of the digital home initiative of Intel.
"The digital home concept is of being connected anytime, anywhere through any devices and across all content. It is about peer-to-peer (P2P) at its most efficient. This means, the devices are individually able to recognise each other's presence and are able to communicate with each without any central point of contact," added Bhandari.
In promoting the digital home across the world, Intel was part of several standards of which Digital Living Network Alliance was one. Formed as the Digital Home Working Group in 2003, the group changed its name to DLNA in June 2004.
It also came out with interoperability guidelines for moving content across multiple consumer devices. The alliance, which grew from 17 members to nearly 150, plans to bring out DLNA compliant products by 2005.
"The industry has to work together to make the digital home possible. That includes consumer electronic vendors, IT, content developers and telcos. And Intel will work with all of them to push the digital home," added Bhandari.
