What do you do with your home network?

1. Provide Internet access throughout your home
2. Share a printer
3. Listen to digital music files, Internet radio or a music subscription service, such as Rhapsody, throughout your home
4. View photos or videos stored on your home computer on a TV in your living room
5. Stream movies from Netflix to any TV in your home

If you said yes to 1 and 2, but no to the other possibilities, then you should take a look at our new category of Wireless Entertainment products, and you will definitely want to read up on DLNA and DLNA certification. 

DLNA, short for Digital Living Network Alliance, is a collaboration among more than 200 companies (including big names such as Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, HP, Microsoft, Cisco, Denon and Yamaha). Their goal is to create products that connect to each other across your home network, regardless of manufacturer, so you can easily enjoy your digital content and Internet entertainment channels in any room.

Six members of the DLNA brain trust, including Scott Smyers, the association's board chairman (that's Scott leading the discussion in the photo at  left), visited Crutchfield on June 25 to learn more about our operation and to give us a hands-on demonstration of DLNA-certified products.

They set the stage for the demo by briefing us on the momentum DLNA has recently generated. More than 5,000 certified products are now in the marketplace, so the organization is broadening its scope by adding a consumer awareness campaign to its core mission as a technical standards-setting body.

In the months to come, you'll see the DLNA-certified logo on a growing number of products. To date, the certification list includes:

• 423 TVs
• 31 A/V receivers
• 114 networked hard drives
• 23 Blu-ray players
• 20 mobile phones
• 4 printers
• 2 game consoles
• 27 digital media adapters/set-top boxes
• 3,800 PCs

The product demonstration we were treated to featured a Sony KDL-46XBR8 TV, a Sony VAIO laptop PC running Windows 7,  a Sony PlayStation 3 game console, a Denon AVR-3808CI receiver, Denon's ASD-3W Wi-Fi iPod dock, a Linksys® by Cisco Media Hub, a Linksys dual-N band wireless router, an HP Photosmart C7280 All-in-One Printer, Nokia N85 and N95 mobile phones, and a cable TV set-top box. It was exciting to see all of these devices recognizing each other and allowing such easy playback of digital content.

There were music files, videos and digital photos stored on the media hub, the laptop computer, an iPod sitting in the Denon dock, and on the phones. With some exceptions, these files were readily accessible from the Sony XBR TV, the PS3 (which was connected to a different TV), and the Denon receiver.

When navigating the content folders on the computer, a right click offered a "Play To" command that let us play a file or playlist on one of the compatible DLNA playback components. Photos taken with the cameras could be immediately printed, using the "Print To" command on the phone.

Someday we'll take all this for granted. Meanwhile, there's a window of opportunity for you to have the coolest house in the neighborhood.

Some attendees voiced concerns that the DLNA-certified badge, as it is currently promoted, may overpromise a bit. As I alluded to above, some certified components don't play all file types. We suggested that the DLNA label include icons or color-coding to simply communicate the extent of the component's DLNA feature set. We think this would reduce uncertainty for sales people and consumers and minimize incorrect assumptions that lead to returns.

Kudos to the DLNA leadership for coming to Crutchfield to seek out this sort of feedback. Stay tuned for updates.