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In the 1970s and 1980s, the quickest solution to transport plenty of info between info units was walk it down the hall on a magnetic tape or floppy disk, a strategy that PC scientists jokingly called ‘Sneakernet.’ At my residence, Sneakernet still rules, at least when it comes down to multimedia networking.

If I would like to download a production or Television show from a web service like iTunes, for instance, I attach my laptop to the 10-megabit-per-second wire modem in my office, if I then want to watch that very same show in my living room, I must lug a laptop downstairs.

But consumer-electronics makers have a much different vision under consideration, and they are going to be promoting it to thousands.The vision: customers could merely point a RC at their entertainment center and access video, music, or photographs saved on their computer that has a home broadband network based primarily on old style Ethernet or Wi-Fi connections or far more modern technologies, for instance powerline networking and ultra-wideband ( UWB ) wireless.

The products that have this integration are called ‘media adapters.’ The class has not yet attracted much attention among the electronics-shopping crowds at Best Buy or Circuit Town . But at CES, where part of the great exhibit area will be dedicated to household networking, a number of firms will show off new or lately released models that they hope will appeal to entertainment addicts who need to get the maximum bang for the thousands of bucks they have already spent on the most recent sound systems, higher definition ( HD ) LCD or plasma displays, and home PCs. The $280 device looks like a satellite television box steamrollered to about 1.5 centimeters in depth.

It sits next to your television and stereo, where it communicates with your computer using a typical wired network, if you happen to be fortunate enough to have Ethernet cables built into your walls–or an 802.11g Wi-Fi wireless connection. Your PC will compress the files and send them to the Digital Entertainer in streaming form as quick as your network can handle them. That implies as much as a single hundred megabits per second for a wired Ethernet connection and 54 megabits per 2nd for an 802.11g connection. Both are sufficient to stream HD video, if that is what you have stored.

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