CES: Sneakerware 2009, Part 1

LAS VEGAS -- Despite all the buzz at last week's Consumer Electronics Show about the connected home, some companies still believe the average consumer isn't ready for a world of DLNA, UPnP and MoCA. Just typing those acronyms makes me think they're right. Anyway, there were a couple of sneakerware-based offerings that caught my eye, one of which was from disk-drive-manufacturer Seagate.

Seagate has been pitching its FreeAgent external hard drives to consumers in sort of an eat-your-vegetables way, arguing that they need to back up their photos, music and other digital media in case their PCs fail. How ... compelling. To sweeten the deal, it plans to offer a $129 docking station next month called the FreeAgent Theater that will let users display the contents of their external (or USB) drives on their big-screen TVs. I saw a demo of the device at CES and was impressed by how easy it was to find media stored on a drive, play it and do simple productions, such as digital-photo slideshows with music. One caveat: The picture quality varied with the source material, with high-definition files looking very good on the big screen, the lower-resolution files less so....

... The device plugs into a TV set, not a home network. Seagate's then-CEO, Bill Watkins (he was given his walking papers shortly after the show ended), told me the company decided not to give the FreeAgent Theater an Ethernet port or WiFi capabilities because it wasn't targeting that market, at least not yet. The idea was to let people walk their hard drives over from their PCs, slide them into the dock, pick up a remote control and start enjoying music, pictures and movies on the TV. "Trying to do this with a network is very frustrating," he said. Having pulled an all-nighter last month trying to get my Samsung Blu-ray player to talk to the Netflix servers, I have to concede his point.

The trade-off, however, is that the FreeAgent Theater can't show any movies you might have rented or bought from a legitimate online outlet, such as iTunes, CinemaNow or Jaman. All rely on DRMs that restrict playback to authorized devices, and the authorization process requires an Internet connection. By contrast, Seagate's new docking station has no problem with movies downloaded from file-sharing networks, provided they're in the DivX, MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 format. Watkins' advice for the Hollywood studios: Accept less security in exchange for broader distribution and higher sales. That argument fell on deaf ears five years ago, but attitudes in Hollywood have changed dramatically over the last 12 months, he said. Studio executives now are looking for ways to embrace new distribution systems and make their content more readily available. One sure sign of change: According to Watkins, when Seagate met with Hollywood executives in previous years, they sat down with the studios' lawyers. "Now it's with techy guys. They worked at IBM, they worked at Apple."

Photos: sneaker image from www.graffeeti.com; FreeAgent Theater from Seagate; 2007 photo of Bill Watkins by Paul Sakuma / Associated Press

-- Jon Healey

Healey writes editorials for The Times' Opinion Manufacturing Division.