2Wire unveils its digital home connectivity platform.

LAS VEGAS--Microsoft wasn’t the only company at the Consumer Electronics Show that prominently featured the connected home. In Las Vegas this week, the digital or connected home was on display widely, and new levels of simplicity, connectivity and convergence were the focus of many companies’ announcements and plans. 

In conjunction with the show, broadband service provider 2Wire unveiled what it claims is the industry’s first fully integrated platform for digital home connectivity, adding a new intelligent home server and a shifter remote video and multimedia access feature to its broadband services platform. The company hopes that through bundled service plans, its platform will allow service providers to be the sole source of subscribers’ digital and entertainment needs.

According to Jaime Fink, vice president of technology and strategy for 2Wire, the company’s goal is to enable any content to be played on any device inside and outside the home. The platform integrates interoperable devices, applications and services, allowing for automated storage, backup and universal access to all media types from purchased video to photos, music and user-generated video. Content and services are accessible through a single intuitive Web portal, whether at home or away.

“We realized fairly quickly as service providers came and talked to us, they are not interested in trying to sell the same thing that is sold in retail,” Fink said. “They want to provide a solution to the customer that they can turn into a valued service so [customers] know that their content is being regularly backed up, and if their house burns down, their content will still be there and be able to be restored very easily.”

Fink added that customers won’t have to choose which content to back up over others, as was the case when a more complex system was needed. The 2Wire technology simplifies the backup process into one disk and allows users to back up all of their content, he said.

The MediaPortal also allows providers to combine broadcast satellite or off-air TV programming with broadband services to deliver a service that Fink said will interest customers who fall into one of two categories: companies just beginning to launch storage backup services, which are then realizing that they need to make it more mainstream in order to get into the second category of potential customers, and service providers that have been providing TV services and are realizing they can’t keep up with the large amount of content customers are purchasing themselves from venues like iTunes.

“These are things they’ve never been able to offer their customers,” Fink said. “They have never integrated their services with that content. They want to be able to provide a marriage of the service provider equipment as well as the retail devices and the content the consumer already has. If they don’t do that, their concern is that they’ll really start losing foothold and footprint to companies who are already selling videos and music like Apple and iTunes.”

The 2Wire platform will help these users decrease the churn of customers in IPTV, which Fink said is still relatively high. “If they don’t do something that engages the customer’s product that they go out and voluntarily buy on their own, they really won’t have a sticky service with customers,” he said.

Fink said that 2Wire’s telco customers are expected to begin rolling out services featuring the MediaPortal in the third quarter.