SBC opens door to home invasion

In chaos is opportunity. As some axiom about business goes. If you believe in that kind of stuff, there's plenty of opportunity awaiting telcos and vendors as we dive headfirst into what for some old timers is going to be a bit of déjà vu and for newcomers is a natural evolution.

This week's announcement from SBC that it would launch a bundled home entertainment service that will allow users to do cool things like transfer photos and music from PC to TV (and by natural extension the surround sound) opens up an old/new front for the former Bell. After two decades plus one year--almost to the day--of carefully avoiding providing service to any piece of copper beyond the network demarcation point save for those highly profitable "line insurance" programs, SBC is staking its claim as a service provider that will ignore the old demarc points and own the entire network all the way up to the end device. Just like old times.

But in the intervening 21 years, the home has become a lot more complex and ugly. Half the consumers in the U.S. have PCs now, digital cameras are outselling traditional models, game consoles are as likely to be attached to the living room TV as a DVD player, and just try getting your hands on an iPod. All of which makes moving digital files around the home much more difficult. Add in TiVo's announcement that it will allow subscribers to transfer television programs from their TiVo box to a laptop and the bar is raised yet again.

And here's where the vendors get to step in. The in-home network of the future won't be solved by throwing Wi-Fi at it. Despite backers' claims that the technology does everything short of curing cancer--and for free--Wi-Fi or any wireless technology simply can't handle everything. The answer lies in vendors providing products that use existing coax and copper to unite all the devices into a coherent and manageable network. 2Wire clearly has an early lead and looks smart for ditching the retail route and distributing through carriers instead. But there's a big French company, a large German company, a good-sized Canadian company and at least one significant American entity that does the same and likely will be champing at the bit. Microsoft also will have its say, as will a slew of vendors from Taiwan and China.

The world is about to get a little bit more familiar, yet different. The question is whether in chaos there really is opportunity, or does pandemonium reign?

E-mail me at vvittore@primediabusiness.com.