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A Consumer’s Eye View of Whole Home Storage

In our previous article, Why We Need Whole Home Storage Architecture, we outlined the significant storage-related issues consumers will confront as they accumulate large collections of digital media files across multiple devices. In this article, we propose a Whole Home Storage solution that addresses many of the current cross-device user experience issues and opportunities Intel has identified through a wealth of user research conducted in the last two years. We will discuss Intel’s prototype solution for Whole Home Storage and describe some of the benefits and challenges as we test it in homes. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of Intel’s Whole Home Storage team, including John Carroll, Daria Loi, Shane Matthews, Sasanka Prabhala, Michael Sabo and Matthew Shopsin.

While most of us enjoy creating and collecting digital photos, videos and music, many people are discouraged by the complex challenge of accessing, moving, organizing, backing-up, reformatting and annotating their multi-gigabyte digital media libraries. Adding to the complexity is the increasing propensity in many homes to spread these media libraries across an ever broadening spectrum of storage-capable consumer electronics products and PCs. These products have different capabilities and interfaces, and users have no simple way to move, protect or access all the ‘stuff’ stored across these multiple devices.

The TV continues to be the most loved and used consumer electronics product in the home, and the advent of big screen, high definition digital TV makes the living room a natural place to enjoy all forms of personal and acquired media, in addition to broadcast programming. The Intel® Media Processor CE 3100 contributes to this trend by making it possible for consumer electronics devices such as set top boxes and TVs to deliver rich Internet media and connected experiences to the TV.

Among its many other capabilities, the Intel Media Processor CE 3100 can manage video from multiple sources, including CE devices and PCs connected over home networks. The perfect complement to these capabilities is the ability to enjoy seamless access to personal media stored on different CE devices in the home. On the TV, the experience should be as easy as selecting a favorite channel, regardless of where media is actually stored. On the PC, the experience should be as easy as accessing media files from the local drive. Intel’s research confirms that providing easy, consistent and intuitive access to media storage around the home is something that people clearly value.

Whole Home Storage is a technology solution under exploration at Intel with the goal of meeting these objectives. By bringing together all media stored within the home, this technology is expected to enable even the most non-technical people to enjoy a new set of media experiences no matter where the media is stored.

Viewing and editing photos - Katrina plugs her camera’s memory card into her set top box, allowing her to view the pictures on TV while storing them for access from any networked device in the home. From her PC the next day she decides she’d like to send the pictures to her Mom, but before she does so she crops and removes red-eye from a few of the photos. That evening Katrina’s husband Eric relaxes on the couch and pulls up the photos on the TV. He admires how nice they look and comments on the great editing Katrina has done. He also pulls up the entire family photo library, which gives him access to all photos stored anywhere in the home in a single collection. Eric spends the next half-hour flipping through old memories.

Storing & viewing videos - Sriram has a series of broadcast shows set to record regularly using his digital video recorder (DVR). As his DVR storage becomes full, additional recordings are automatically routed to spare hard drive space on his PC. Sriram can enjoy these stored shows from any device on his network without the need to worry about where the programs are stored.

Listening to & sharing music - Daria uses her PC to buy new music from an Internet store. The music is stored on her PC, but she can also find and listen to these songs and any other music stored on her PC from her Netbook, the TV and her network-connected home stereo.

Whole-home media back-up - Anita is browsing through the family’s digital media on her TV and realizes that her family has recently added a lot of new material to the whole-home family media library. Some of it came in from her son from the family PC. Other photos came from her daughter on her laptop, and some came from her husband, who purchased new music on his phone while traveling and transferred it to his laptop when he arrived home. Anita wants to make sure everything is protected. She simply selects a “back-up family library” option on the TV. All media in the home is immediately backed up to a large digital storage device located in the home office.

Some people are already finding ways to do these things, but without the ease of use provided by an explicit whole home storage capability, the ad-hoc setups are unnecessarily complex and limited. The key to a successful solution is the ability to deliver on the following value propositions, as identified by Intel user research.

“Just like that I was seeing videos of my kids on the TV that have been buried on my PC for years.”

Worldwide research conducted by Intel’s User Experience Group tells us that one of the things people like best about the TV viewing experience is its simplicity. Viewers simply plug in their TV, turn it on and watch a program. The usage model gets somewhat more complicated when we start accessing media from the Internet, aggregating media files from multiple devices, or sharing media between TVs, PCs, phones and other connected devices.

Whole Home Storage should provide a way to identify any device connected to the home network and allow media access from the device in the proper format for viewing on the device chosen by the user. A Whole Home Storage view provides users with a unified namespace, or directory structure, for media stored on the local hard drive within the device, plus the media stored on connected devices wherever they are on the network.

“I downloaded a live music video clip on my phone and when I got home I brought it up on the TV to show my sister. The clip just showed up on the TV. I loved it so much I watched it again on my laptop the next day .”

Consumers will use their home networks to connect devices ranging from TVs and PCs to mobile phones and mobile Internet devices, and each of these devices will have its own user interface. According to Intel’s vision of Whole Home Storage, each of these devices is best suited for different tasks. Aggregated media, whatever its type, should be available from any of these devices. The view of media files must preserve commonality from one device to another and be optimized for viewing on whatever device someone is using at the moment.

Home networks are also becoming dynamic environments. Devices come and go. Consumers constantly collect new media on a variety of devices. Mobile devices should be able to use the home network to share media with other connected devices. Whole Home Storage makes the consumer’s storage experience as close as possible to the experience of using a local hard drive.

Figure 1. Simplifying the storage paradigm
Whole Home Storage should simplify the increasingly complex and dynamic home storage paradigm. All connected devices, including mobile devices, should be able to use the home network to share media with other connected devices.

“It’s great to know that while I can see all of our videos on the TV, my young son cannot access the videos that are not appropriate for him.”

The whole home storage system should provide individual users with easy access to their favorite media, while enabling controls to prevent unwanted access by others on the home network. Having an aggregated view of all the media files on the network is wonderful, except when parents do not want to make certain files accessible by young children or other viewers. The system should help people easily set access controls by providing each person with his or her personalized view into all media.

“I have no idea how it shows me every photo we have across our three laptops and four media phones on the TV. I just know it’s brilliant, fun and easy to make it happen.”

Non-technical consumers want a system that “just works,” without complex interaction or layers of technical details. The heart of the traditional TV usage model is the magic of pressing a button and instantly seeing the media they want. It is incumbent on the Whole Home Storage system to preserve this essential experience.

At the same time, we need some assurance that the system is doing what it is supposed to do – accurately storing files, protecting them against loss, and in some cases restricting access. One of the principal benefits Whole Home Storage can offer is media protection, because aggregated media stored on the network will allow automatic or one-step backup of all media across all devices from any individual device.

One useful analogy for this is how people relate to their cars. The car should always be ready to go without much thought by the driver about how the engine works. Driving one car is very much like driving another without special instructions needed to master basic operation.

Working from the necessary end user value propositions, Intel has identified a set of technical requirements that should be satisfied by a whole home media aggregation solution:

• The system should provide a single unified namespace, including media stored on connected devices across the home and accessible from any device across the home. This common view of media must relieve the user of the need to remember which media is on which device.
• The storage-level solution should enable use of new and existing applications, so customers can keep using their favorite applications or freely move to new more powerful applications.
• The solution must work with existing already deployed PCs. Allowing only new PCs to interoperate would create an unacceptable barrier for introduction into the home.
• This storage-level solution must work naturally with emerging media sharing standards, notably the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) protocol, as well as established network storage protocols such as the Server Message Block (CIFS/SMB) protocol.
• The storage system must provide read only access for media the user wants to share but does not want to be changed.
• The system must also allow read/write access, so media can be edited in place and shared by more than just the local device.

To determine the practicality of whole home media aggregation technology, Intel has developed a prototype Whole Home Storage solution. We have experimented with this system in the lab and deployed it to several homes to learn the benefits and challenges of our approach.

Figure 2. Aggregated view of whole home storage
Media stored on multiple devices appears to the user as a unified directory, which is accessible by networked devices anywhere in the home.

Our prototype provides access to whole home media at the file/directory level, the same level that is commonly accessed by PC applications and quite familiar to PC users. The prototype uses existing network file access protocols to move requested files over the network, specifically Microsoft’s Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. The Whole Home Storage prototype presents a unified namespace appearing to the user as a unified directory tree accessible to networked devices throughout the home.

The whole home directory incorporates directories shared across the network that contain underlying directory structures already built by the user or application. Each of these directory structures is incorporated into the single unified directory that preserves the underlying structure. The automatic merge eliminates the need for the user to know which file is stored on which device. Applications interact with the files provided in this whole home view just as they would with local files. The application decides what to expose to the user, how it is exposed to the user and what can and cannot be played.

The merge combines the contents of identically named directories. When directories are combined, colliding identical files are shown as a single file. File operations performed on a colliding file or directory are carried out across all copies, just as the user would expect. Directories added as read/write shares allow in-place modification and contribute to shared storage. Directories added as read-only shares only allow access to the files. Either makes media usable throughout the unified namespace.

Intel’s prototype is designed to automatically handle devices entering and leaving the home network: when a device leaves, the media uniquely held on that device becomes unavailable; when the device returns, its uniquely stored media is automatically reintegrated into the aggregated view.

The Intel Whole Home Storage prototype has been deployed in eight homes to allow early exploration of user experiences. The homes all met certain criteria. All of them have media and data stored on multiple PCs and have large media collections. At most homes several people share the computing resources and share media across multiple machines. In some cases a single “power user” in the home has significant storage requirements that span multiple PCs.

Our deployment experience is only anecdotal, but has already provided examples of some of the benefits of Whole Home Storage:

• Finding pictures - Pictures tend to be uploaded from a camera to the most convenient available PC, leaving photos distributed through the home. Several users reported using the whole home directory to find the pictures they were interested in viewing without having to remember, or physically move to, the PC actually used to store the picture. Users appreciated that the familiar directory structure was preserved.
• Software installation - Some applications are distributed through Internet download and can be installed on multiple machines. Users included the “downloads” directory in their whole home view and enjoyed the convenience of finding the application they wished to install, instead of waiting for another internet download.
• New system integration - One user purchased a new laptop and turned to the whole home view to populate the new computer. A copy-and-paste transferred the music directory from the whole home view into the music directory of the new computer. All the music stored on three PCs within the home was copied to the new laptop as an already organized directory structure.
• Enhanced media streaming applications - Another household pointed a DLNA media server to the whole home view. The whole home view media files became accessible on the television through a DLNA digital media player.
• Large and expandable media store - Several homes have media collections that are too large to store on any single device. These homes also report applications for storing or viewing media that are limited to a single media directory. In these homes the whole home view aggregates storage across the home, providing a single, large and easily expandable storage resource for these legacy applications.

We also heard about challenges faced by the users:

• Setup - Setup can be a challenge: SMB shares can be automatically identified, but on home networks this process can be error-prone. In addition, users do not always know how to create and configure new shares.
• Loss of control - While people generally like whole home view, some users have concerns about the loss of control of their files. Not knowing where a file is stored is unsettling and could lead to data loss if a system is permanently removed from the home.
• Files inaccessible when devices are unavailable - When a system is turned off, files held only on that system become inaccessible. This is inconvenient and can be confusing.

It is clear from our experiences with the Whole Home Storage prototype that the solution has great promise, and people find interesting ways to use the capability. It is also clear that improvements in ease of use, especially during setup, would be required in a productized version.

The consumer electronics industry has provided numerous ways to create and acquire media over the years using devices ranging from digital cameras and PCs to mobile phones and DVRs. Whole Home Storage solutions can provide a simple way to enjoy, manage and modify this media from whatever device the consumer wishes to use without worrying about the complex and frustrating process of manually locating and transferring media back and forth.

By providing aggregated and simplified access to all digital media stored in the home, Whole Home Storage will help to enable compelling new usage models for the TV and other networked devices. Instead of only accessing media on the device in which it is stored, or going through an inconvenient process to copy media to another specific device, people can have access to all media from any device, anywhere on their home network.

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