All in the brand family

The consumer-electronics industry has long designed devices with industrywide compatibility in mind. And computermakers have become more open with their technology recently. It's a necessary move, given that consumers still bristle at overt efforts to channel their purchases.

"As of right now, people still value flexibility," says Peterson. "They aren't ready to be limited to just one brand."

Put aside the notion that disparate electronic devices can be linked up – same brand name or not. Weren't consumers told they were headed for a single device that could do it all?

In the mid-1990s, the future of consumer electronics, experts thought, would focus on the television. A few years later, it moved to the desktop computer. And more recently, it's been the video-game console.

Advances in digital technology have led experts to believe that the functions performed by a variety of electronic devices would ultimately converge into one all-purpose appliance.

Electronic manufacturers continue to tinker with that vision. Just last month, Hewlett Packard said it would soon sell a Media Center PC, which combines the functions of a CD and DVD player, TV, and digital jukebox, with the many features of a computer.

But many experts agree that even if such a device could be manufactured profitably, most consumers would not buy in. Recent studies have shown that most people prefer using separate devices to perform separate tasks.

Still, consumers do want to move data easily from one electronic device to another. The answer: home networks, which rely on wireless and phone-line connections.

"If you can send content from one device to another, then no device has to do everything," says Jed Kolko, a consumer-technology analyst with Forrester Research in San Francisco.

Before home networks become widely used, Mr. Kolko says consumer-electronics companies need to cover three bases: standardized connections between devices, easy setup, and the ability to move content around legally.

The first of those is beginning to be met through a wireless format called Wi-Fi, which beams data rather than requiring cables.

To help with ease of setup, some providers of high-speed Internet service offer home-networking support.

The third front – legal transfers of content – is being debated in Congress, where some legislators want to block consumers' ability to send, say, a digital movie from their computer's hard drive to a blank DVD. They believe doing so violates copyright protections.

But the evolution toward home-networking appears poised to accelerate. Millions of consumers have already begun creating local-area networks among multiple computers. The next phase, in which video-game consoles connect to the Internet, is also gaining ground.

It will probably be quite a few years, say experts, before the final step, in which the computer realm fully connects to the entertainment realm, and consumers are able to send files from their PC to their televisions and stereo systems as easily as they send e-mails now.

"This is not an 'if' question, but more of a question of when," says Egil Juliussen, president of ET Forecasts, a technology firm in Buffalo Grove, Il.

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