Strong appetite for the home network market

CES is the right place to analyze the strategies of main players in the home network market. The living home market was very hot in Las Vegas last week with many traditional players announcing new products, but also a bunch of new comers exited by the expected evolution of the user demand. Apple and Microsoft are considered as traditional players with all sorts of PCs already in the living room, but both of them do not seem interested to stay there just for PCs and software. They want to be part of the media convergence and announced new products to be part of an embryonic home network. Be it a Hub (Apple) or a Home Server (Microsoft), or a Home media adapter (Cisco), the target is about the same: distribute TV, telephony, videos, movies, music, etc, between any multimedia device within the household. IPTV was the other hot market, ignited with the Microsoft- Cisco head-head confrontation in coming months. Cisco seems determined to assemble a wide-range IPTV solution of its own and compete with Alcatel-Lucent and its ally Microsoft. Besides new product announcements, Cisco has surprised the audience during its keynote speech at CES. J. Chamber unveiled its vision of the home market and considers the home network as key. "It's the next wave of the Internet revolution," and Cisco plans to make the network easy, and of course play a big role in it. In addition, Microsoft enlarged the home environment to the automotive ecosystem, with its Sync technology to securely manage vocal applications command and internet connection while driving, and with Ovation iX that brings new services to filling stations (mobile payment, touch screen command, ..).