US communications giant Verizon last week released a YouTube video exploring the history of its set top box hardware development over the last six years. The company’s innovation gurus detail the advances made in moving to a greener, Energy Star compliant design for efficiency, but also signalled a future move to a distribution model powered by a media server in the home. Sound familiar?
The plan would be to drop a large, but reasonably elegant (if the model shown on the video goes forward) media server under the main TV, in theory with sufficient space and bandwidth to store a host of content. Whilst that box would push content to your main TV directly, other TVs in the home would use very small STB clients to connect to that media server to acquire and display content. Better still, building on Verizon’s recent FiOS TV launch on Xbox 360, the company would seek to allow other CE devices around the home to also act as clients to pull content from the media server.
In the past, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who felt that this model was a very natural fit for Windows Home Server – drop a great looking 10 foot user interface on top of Microsoft’s platform, build a low energy, lounge-friendly CE device to store, protect and serve users local data and, of course, build out a first class Entertainment offer for distributing media around the home and remotely to mobile devices.
Looks like Verizon are thinking along similar lines, albeit most likely (I’d guess) with a Linux based server – Connected TVs are one thing, but add storage, serving, data protection, remote access and high quality entertainment? You’d have a truly 21st Century device.
Check out the video below:
