Green and great IT for home users

Since I'm a technology enthusiast, I'm interested in home automation for a long time.

While most people think of automation in terms of "Which switch does what?", I prefer the "Earl Grey, hot!" approach. Essentially, I'd like to think of it as a complete integration of all electronic devices in the household. Which means computers, TV, handhelds, phones and mobile phones and all sort of kitchenware are all able to interact which each other and (of course) the occupants.

In my opinion, all that is already possible today, even if there are few (or none) solutions to buy.

Let's have a look at a typical small German town: detached houses with plenty of room for centralized IT solutions and a satellite dish, at least two TVs, digital satellite receivers, more than one computer, a notebook and at least one mobile phone.

Since energy prices are rising, a lot of owners are thinking about refurbishment. What better chance to finally introduce home automation to your building and get a decent network access to every room?

One thing I'd love to see is a centralized multimedia solution. If you're using satellite TV, you already noticed that you'll need at least one cable and one receiver in every room you like to watch TV. That's quite uncomfortable and quite expensive, especially if you'd like to use more features than just watching a channel.

What about "Video over IP"? Or even better: "Multimedia desktop over IP"? Set up a MythTV Server with -say- 6 dual-channel DVB-S cards. This would allow any MythTV-Frontend to play live satellite TV, even if it's a wireless tablet pc. While this saves the need for a digital receiver in every room, it still requires a decent powered (and expensive) terminal to view the multimedia content.

So what about this: Get a cheap dumb (energy efficient) terminal which is able to show multimedia content. While it seems like an easy solution, no one is offering that kind of product.

While researching this idea, I found this blog entry from Craig Bender, who shows some promising bleeding-edge features of the Sun Ray Technology:

While I really enjoy to see someone finally working on this, there are a few drawbacks:

* Sun Ray (especially the Appliance Link Protocol) is proprietary technology.
* I'm quite sure it does not handle HD content right now
* Sun isn't well-known for consumer products and focuses on business use

I'd love to see vendors integration of an open standards "HD-Video over IP" solution. Just plug in your TV to the network or use a dumb wireless terminal to enjoy your multimedia/home automation system in the bathroom. Use your digital picture frame to access all automation features and save a lot of energy by centralizing all household IT. You might even want to detach your DVD-drive from a preassigned usage. Just plug the drive to the network and let it pump all content to the central server. Now every terminal is able to view the contents. Start watching a DVD on your TV, grab your wireless dumb terminal and finish watching on the patio. Use the wireless dumb terminal as a recipe book in the kitchen and use it to video-call your friends (You might want to have the camera integrated).

As said before: Most of the technology is already available and I have a brazillion ideas on what to do with such a system.

So if some Sun employees are reading this (I know some do): You might want to think about consumer goods again.