“After running in the middle of the pack with several other transmission schemes for a decade, 1394 is poised to break out this year. The high-speed technology is about to take its place tying together the pieces in the home theater’s move from analog to digital TV. In addition, the technology–also called FireWire and i-Link–is beginning to show up in surprising ways in enterprise applications,” W. David Gardner reports for TechWeb News.
“‘The really interesting stuff-wireless–is coming later this year,’ said 1394 Trade Association (TA) executive director James Snider in an interview. ‘We’ve already showed that 1394 wireless can go through walls with no degradation of the signal.’ Snider said more than 1300 separate products now include 1394, ranging from HDD drives and set-top boxes to televisions and DVDs,” Gardner reports.
“The technology has had to hurdle several obstacles along the way. It has beat off competitive threats from DVI, Ethernet, and USB. Hollywood interests, too, tied up the technology for years, as the film industry worried 1394’s capability of producing perfect copies of films would cut into profits. The result is a regulation that permits users of devices with 1394 technology to copy material for personal use,” Gardner reports.
“‘FireWire will be in virtually every high-end computer–in workstations and, particularly, in Apple machines,’ Snider said… He noted that Apple is putting the technology in its computers to beef-up its traditional emphasis on graphics and video. In fact, Apple pioneered the 1394 technology, which it called FireWire. Snider said the FireWire moniker might, in fact, replace the 1394 title as the technology becomes more widespread,” Gardner reports.
Full article here.
