Powerline Networking with the Western Digital Livewire

Western Digital's strategy in releasing products such as the WDTV or the WDTV Live can easily be deciphered as a way to drive the sales of their storage products. After all, storage is the bread and butter of Western Digital's revenue. However, a product such as the WD Livewire doesn't seem to fit into that mould at first glance.

The WDTV, WDTV Live, WDTV Live Plus and the upcoming WD Elements Play (apparently meant for the non-US market) seem to indicate that Western Digital is becoming a leading brand in the digital media player space. However, this market also involves content that gets distributed over the Internet and contents which streams across the internal home network. The official WD line is that consumers do not usually have network connections available in their living room or near where their TV is located. Therefore, it is the intent of WD to help solve this problem by providing the WD Powerline AV Network Kit.

At AnandTech, we believe that the Livewire product family is intended to further its presence in the consumer NAS market. Presently, the ShareSpace NAS product is intended for usage in SOHO environments. However, the explosion of consumer HD camcorders and the willingness of people to back up their Blu-Rays on mass storage has brought with it a situation in which the average consumer is no longer satisfied with a terabyte or so of storage offered by external hard disks. External hard disks are also not amenable to media streaming or periodic backups for multiple computers. In this upcoming scenario, a WD powerline product in conjunction with a consumer oriented ShareSpace model could work wonders. Consumers would be thrilled to have their NAS sitting in the basement, powered and connected to the household network from the same power outlet. There would be no necessity to worry about wireless reach or the noise that would be made by the NAS if it were to sit in the consumer's home theatre room. The powerline networking product is one more step by Western Digital in its quest to makes its presence felt in every component of media delivery (from the storage to the network and onto the media player sitting by the side of the TV) in the house.

Western Digital's Future Strategy?

However, the first generation Livewire doesn't have the necessary capability to fulfil this scenario. With the upcoming Atheros AR7400 chipset promising better bandwidth, and the HomePlug AV2 standards which promise Gigabit speeds, the outlined scenario might not be beyond the realms of possibility.