Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) Essentials
Enabling bridges between services within a connected home

By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

Created: April 1, 2007

Upon mentioning DLNA to broadband service providers (BSP)s one is met with blank stares. Many think DLNA is some kind of unrelated biotech innovation or has something to do with DNA rather than what it really is – a consumer electronics communication standard which is revolutionizing interoperability and content sharing among fixed and mobile devices in the home. In this article we will introduce you to this promising technology backed by 220 member companies including the top 10 Consumer Electronics (CE) manufacturers and the top 5 chip manufacturers.

The US home consumer electronics market is on the rise, amounting to $135 billion in 2006 according to CE, but more importantly there is plenty of room for it to grow. One of the keys to its future growth is the relatively non-existent networked capability of the most prolific devices within consumer homes such as Televisions and Stereos. However, other less prolific CE devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA)s, game consoles, and Digital Video Recorders (DVR)s are also not frequently networked. In all, none of these devices are networked in more than 14% of homes (most less than 9%) according to Parks Associates. Based on the 2005 census, the number of households  (HH) in the US was 108.8 million and based on this figure the following table (Table 1.0) represents the breakdown of the most prolific CE devices within the household and how many are networked.

The significance of this networked deficiency is the result of two major stumbling blocks for the average CE device:

• A suitable network doesn’t exist within most homes. Only 20% of broadband homes have some kind of network according to a Pew Survey conducted in 2006.
• There are no ubiquitous standards within the home to allow disparate consumer electronics to communicate. Instead, each CE manufacturer has its own control cables and signaling which are not compatible with any other manufacturer or households must select one of a number of competing networking technologies - none of which are supported by all CE devices.

However, this landscape is changing rapidly and virtually the whole industry is getting on board. One standard in particular called Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) has matured to the point where several CE devices in 2006 were certified with DLNA logos – meaning these products will work with other DLNA certified products of other manufacturers. DLNA represents the content negotiation and sharing portion of a much broader Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) standard that deals with the lower level intercommunications between disparate networked devices. But what is DLNA and why should BSPs care about it?

CE building its own bridges

It used to be that BSPs offered one of the few available technology bridges around – allowing consumers to connect Set Top Boxes (STB)s to most televisions, play Video on Demand (VoD) movies on their televisions, control most VCRs through technologies (remember IR-Blaster?), and offer up a universal remote to control the complete system. Bridges are important because they allow consumers to be multidimensional in terms of the number of different things one can do with a single device. Enter DLNA, which allows consumer devices to all speak the same language (albeit initially somewhat limited), but their technical capability vocabulary is expanding as is their audience (the number of shipping DLNA certified devices). In fact, in DLNA's second specification (v1.5) released in late 2005, it defines 10 new device classes and has increased the number of certification test labs to 4 which are strategically placed in US, Japan, Belgium and Taiwan.

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