Network Connectivity Joins the AV Club

Over the past few weeks, a couple of announcements around consumer electronics connectivity have caught my eye. In late April, the DiiVA Interactive TV standard was announced after a year of development, with the backing of mainstream CE manufacturers LG, Panasonic, and Samsung, along with the Chinese government and a number of major Chinese CE manufacturers. The DiiVA standard was designed to integrate HD Video, multi-channel audio and bi-directional data (Ethernet and USB) in a single cable. Then, just last week, the HDMI Licensing group announced the HDMI 1.4 specification, which will integrate Ethernet connectivity within the HDMI cable. 

As the number of Internet-connected CE devices continues to expand, connectivity standards grow ever more important. This is evidenced by the growing list of interconnect cable standards: DiiVA and HDMI 1.4 join the likes of MoCA and HomePlug in bringing Internet to the living room. HDMI already holds a strong position, with integration on virtually every TV being sold these days. In addition, HDMI is built-in to DVD players, Blu-ray players, video game consoles, audio/video receivers, and even some portable devices. This alone gives HDMI a leg-up on the competition, with shipments already in the hundreds of millions. 

The HDMI 1.4 spec will be interesting to follow, as the cable can be used to distribute the Internet connection to a plethora of devices, requiring only one device to bridge to the home network either via a wired or wireless connection. One device that could benefit from this development is the A/V receiver, since many home theaters already use this as a central hub and point of distribution for audio and video signals. One could envision the A/V receiver acting as a switch or router, with a connection via Ethernet or Wi-Fi on one end and the HDMI 1.4 outputs on the other.

Since HDMI is already integrated on a large number of devices, there may be a potential to exclude a separate Ethernet (RJ-45) connection on these devices, thus enabling a small cost savings to the manufacturer. This should be carefully thought out though. New standards always come with a caveat that the consumer must purchase new equipment (and new cables) with the HDMI 1.4 standard in order to utilize these features. Until there is a significant penetration of installed equipment with any of these new standards, Ethernet will remain as a connection option on most ‘enabled’ devices.