out of the console, into the living room

it's January, which means that somewhere in the world (specifically, Las Vegas), the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is occuring. CES is one of the big consumer electronics shows (the hint is in the name, really) - and coming as it does at the start of the year, it allows companies to pitch to the general public their views of the coming year in CE.

this year, one of the big themes would appear to be home servers:

Sony to Enable TVs to play Internet Video
A Home network, on the cheap
Bill Gates sees a home server in your future
Apple, MS to unveil digital media systems
HP pitches home servers

the best takeaway from this raft of stories comes from Bill Gates, in an interview with Kotaku:

"The reason we got into Xbox was not just for gaming," he said. "It's a general purpose computer. ...

"We wouldn't have done it if it was just a gaming device," he said. "We wouldn't have gone into the category at all. It was strategically getting into the living room. This is not some big secret, Sony says the same things."

'people want to do things with their content across multiple platforms'

and indeed, BBC News is reporting that Bill Gates' main pitch at CES was for the Windows Home Server:

Mr Gates also unveiled a new product in conjunction with HP which lets people store all their data on a central device and access from any number of Windows-connected products, including the Zune portable music player, the Xbox 360, PCs and phones.

The Windows Home Server is a storage system which can hold more than one terabyte of data.

Photos, music and videos can be saved to the system and accessed from many other devices in the home and even remotely via the internet.