LifeMedia Servers on the Way

  • By DIGITAL HOME Staff

Less than two months after one of its leading partners said it would stop making a product that was important to its home control solution, Exceptional Innovation said this week it would make similar products itself. Beginning this summer, Westerville, Ohio-based Exceptional Innovation plans to sell its own LifeMedia line of digital media server, according to company officials.

In March, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced it would stop making its Digital Entertainment Center product. Although Exceptional Innovation's LifeWare platform runs on several Media Center systems, HP's was the most high-profile. It was also the centerpiece of Best Buy's LifeWare-based ConnectedLife.Home package.

The new LifeMedia products resemble traditional A/V receivers and come with 500 gigabytes to 4.5 terabytes of storage for digital music, movies, pictures, and recorded TV. They also give homeowners complete access to the LifeWare control system through a home network. The servers can be configured with a digital CableCard, NTSC or ATSC tuners, a rewritable DVD drive, and Dolby Master Studio decoding. Versions that include HD DVD and Blu-ray drives are coming, officials said.

The move is significant in light of the fact that Exceptional Innovation has made a name by creating an open platform that would allow builders and installers to mix and match components. Now with its own line of media servers, in addition to its own touch panels, controllers, storage servers, and other hardware, the company more closely resembles manufacturers such as Control4, which sell much of the hardware that runs its software.

The move could be an astute one, considering how systems running Microsoft's Media Center software often need to be tweaked to deliver the best performance. In a statement, Exceptional Innovation vice president of marketing Mike Seamons said, "No one has lived with and done more testing of Media Centers over the past four years than we have, and we have addressed the shortcomings of previous systems along with every other lesson we have learned in the design of these servers."

The LifeMedia Server line includes five models, ranging from a set-top design to a high-performance, four-rack unit. Pricing is expected to start at $4,500.