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

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A DLNA device works like any other network device by discovering other DLNA enabled hosts but then goes on to learn their capabilities and exposing these features on the device’s control display. Through DLNA, a media server can be located and then summoned to play or display a stored family photo, movie, music file, etc. - this is the extent of the v1.0 DLNA specification. Think of it as a multi-room DVR on steroids that you don’t have to purchase entirely from Motorola but rather can let your subscriber buy in interchangeable pieces from Panasonic, Pioneer, Sony, and Sharp. In the future, DLNA will add digital media printing, the ability to push images to a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, manage media with a mobile device, and leverage Quality of Service (QoS) between devices as its technical capability and vocabulary expands.

I recently purchased a Blu-ray Disc (BD) player with DLNA and upon plugging it in the player immediately began looking for a media server on my home network. Had I exposed a media server to my BD player I could then easily switch between a high definition movie and some other media accessible over my home network. While this might not happen as much from a BD player, it would seem much more natural from a television or a stereo to engage this switch. However, until consumers start swapping out their televisions, the next most logical device they will buy is either a BD player or a DVR - so if either of these devices support DLNA consumers can leverage one of these devices to make up for the fact that their television doesn't have this functionality. In 2007, CE should start shipping stereos and televisions with DLNA built in which will also help DLNA gain more market penetration - not to mention encourage these consumers to purchase other DLNA equipment.

So what?

For decades CE devices haven’t worked together, so why should this change now? This time it will be different because instead of each manufacturer developing its own proprietary cables and signaling that none of them could ever agree on before HDMI, this time CE is working together using standard networking (Ethernet) and they are requiring interoperability testing to use the DLNA logo. Using Ethernet allows CE manufacturers to build upon existing standards, silicon, and know how – which translates to - things are going to mature very quickly. DLNA’s expanding vocabulary and installed base should expand dramatically in the coming years due to the rising interest to network CE devices in the home, which will also contribute to making this technology something that BSPs are sure to put on their near term radar.

Like BSP television offerings expanding the number of programming choices afforded to consumers as well as extend programming choices to offer on-demand and interactive content, BSPs also can expand and extend DLNA if they choose to do so. DLNA and UPnP create a nest of interoperable and inter-accessible technology within each networked home – essentially creating a desirable island of rich media functionality within the home. This rich media functionality within the home is what most BSPs specialize in, so it seems like a natural extension to build upon. BSPs should treat DLNA capability the same way they treat consumer television reception capability by offering expanded and extended programming. However the types of bridges that are possible with DLNA may differ significantly from those of their mainstream BSP service bridge offerings.

BSP video, wireless, voice, and even Internet services all maintain a fairly significant data center management component that requires integration above the data center to bridge features of one service to another. In fact, the traditional way to bridge these services requires the combination of the following:

• A physical technology bridge, such as IP Multimedia Services (IMS), to connect one service to another
• An OSS/BSS bridge to package, activate, and bill for these services
• And finally, one or more service specific communications bridge(s) that allows various service elements to communicate with each other in order to produce the desired functionality.

This process ends up being rather complicated which is why you don’t see cross service functionality rapidly flowing out of BSP development shops. Note however, there is nothing to prevent DLNA from including other CE devices such as telephones, fax machines, home security systems, etc. which would allow DLNA to bridge those services as well to its growing community of devices. For BSPs, DLNA could be interpreted as CE flexing their muscles and showing that bridging services can just as easily happen within the home as opposed to in the data center. Perhaps more importantly, once networked, there is nothing to prevent other DLNA devices to bridge this network of devices to other Internet based services such as I-Tunes, MovieLink - such innovation is surely being discussed or investigated.

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