Mediabolic Delivering on the Digital Home Concept

By Alexander Grundner

Today I have seen the future and it's not coming from Microsoft -- at least not yet. I got a chance to meet with Jeremy Toeman, associate VP of Mediabolic, for the first time, for an informal get-together. For those unfamiliar with the company, Mediabolic is one of the leaders in the middleware software space for connected home devices. Their flagship software product, the M1 Entertainment Platform, can be found powering many notable products like the Denon NS-S100 Digital Media Server, which won TechTV's "Best of Show" at CES in January, and Creative's SoundBlaster Wireless Music Adapter.

Over lunch we discussed the state of the industry, and convergent devices currently coming to market and on the horizon. Overall, we were pretty much in agreement with the general direction device manufactures were taking consumers in. But things got really interesting when he asked me if I wanted to see of demo of M1 platform at work.

Back at the office, Mediabolic has terrific demo room setup, configured with networked computers and a myriad of M1 enabled connected media devices. I assumed he was going to show me what each product did individually and then move on to the next product, but I was just half right. He went beyond that by pointing out how each device is actually recognized by all the computers running the M1 server software. What's more, all networked M1 enabled PCs can populate all the connected media devices with content stored on each PC's hard drive without any special configuration (an industry first -- this floored me). In other words, if you are using a media adapter in one room, you will see all the digital files available from a networked M1 enabled PC, and if a second or third M1 enabled PC is turned on, then all their additional files will become immediately available.

This function, that I was never aware of, puts a new face on connected entertainment. The idea has always been to setup a shared digital media server to distribute content around the house -- just configure each networked device to pull content from one central location. Made sense, but Mediabolic's no configuration, auto-recognize and populate solution is way more advanced, and provides a better user experience.

All in all, I enjoyed my meeting, but came away impressed with the fact that Mediabolic is company that actually delivers on the promise of interoperable connected devices for the Digital Home. And best of all, anyone can use M1 enabled products with existing networking and PC hardware equipment.