"In short, a battle for control of your living room is about to be waged by consumer electronics makers, developers of personal-computer hardware and software, and set-top-box designers that sell directly to cable and satellite providers. Now that home networking is a reality (albeit a tricky one), companies are building devices that not only store or connect to a range of entertainment choices but also communicate with one another to distribute those choices throughout the home....

Still, traditional arguments against convergence do not necessarily pertain. If you wanted to build a digital camcorder that also takes high-quality still images, you would have to install two image-capturing devices. But adding music-jukebox capability to a digital video recorder, or enabling DVD playback on a game console that already uses a DVD-ROM drive, is simply a software update. By this fall, TiVo customers will have the option of activating a RealOne media player, already a common feature on PC's. While the precise configuration has yet to be announced, the TiVo application is likely to provide not only streaming audio and video from the Internet, but also the ability to store and play hours of music directly from the TiVo's drive....

In the next couple of years, Sony plans to introduce a similar product, the Personal Network Home Storage device. A concept product demonstrated last fall had a capacity of one terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, which means it could hold either 450 hours of DVD-quality movies, 1,500 CD's or 600,000 high-resolution photographs. Presumably that sort of box would sit in the corner of the room or in the basement (one nickname for entertainment servers is "media furnace"). Sony also plans to offer networking in most of its consumer products, so that the content in your media furnace could be vented not only through TV's and audio receivers but also through clock radios and MiniDisc players.

The reason all this is not yet on the market is that manufacturers are still searching for answers to the big questions of simple interoperability." [NY Times Technology]

Emphasis above is mine, mainly because that's the part that made me drool. That's as someone who consumes as much media as I possibly can. Laugh if you want, but my friends will tell you that I could probably fill a terabyte pretty quickly. Hopefully media companies will realize that and take John Robb's advice to help me fill that terabyte, rather than restrict what I consume to the point where it's not worth it anymore.

Putting on my librarian hat causes me no end of concern in the above scenario. When digital content is being sold directly through digital pipelines to consumers, I hope there are ways for libraries to still circulate it. If the current mindset in the entertainment industry prevails and there are no exceptions for libraries to lend digital files, then we will slowly lose our relevance and even our mission to serve our patrons because we can't provide information or entertainment outside of our four walls. That's the exact opposite of what I advocate libraries do - shift their services into their users' worlds.