Now you may not think “Philips” when you think “Custom Install” but the success of high-end Aurea TVs, Pronto remotes and other products makes a new day for the Dutch brand.

Unheralded in the middle of a trade show… buried beneath the piles of press releases and hundreds of exhibits about the latest boxes, cases and gadgets from Taiwan and China, Philips entered the external NAS market. A media gateway for the home.

The European CE giant Philips, famous for its range of monitors, remotes, and other computer peripherals, announced its first Multimedia Hard Drive. The NAS, of course, provides consumers with a central storage location and instant access to files throughout the home when used with a wireless network.

To understand the significance of this product, you have to imagine you are sitting in front of a very demanding jigsaw puzzle.  You are putting the pieces together without an image of the finished puzzle (in other words, you are acting intelligently but blindly). As you place another piece into the puzzle you notice there is an empty space, a space that requires a piece that would be a keystone to solving the puzzle.  Once the keystone piece is in place, it’s then obvious what the completed picture should be and all the other pieces go in, ever so much more easily.

Now think of the puzzle as digital home. Imagine a giant company with one of the largest ranges of peripherals, a known expertise in monitors and TVs, and a leading inventor in storage (remember it’s the 25th anniversary of the CD, a Philips-patented invention).

And here comes the Philips SPD8020… When coupled with a digital media adapter connected to a TV, it becomes a fully functional media server to stream music or video throughout the home.  Consumers can also access their files from any location in the world, using the NAS drive’s built-in FTP server together with an Internet connection.

And that’s what could make the NAS a keystone piece for the Philips strategy of connected home, a focal point that can bring together an increasing number of Philips peripherals in the home that need to talk to each other.

Delivering 500GB, the SPD8020 lets consumers store more than 500,000 photos, three weeks of uncompressed video or 125,000 songs. Encased in thick aluminium, the Philips drive operates quietly, with an accessible standby mode for low energy consumption.  The SPD8020 has a fast gigabit Ethernet connection, and provides the option to add further capacity via its USB host (with another hard drive or memory stick.)

The NAS finally puts a Philips product in the heart of the home network, finishing off a connected vision of how the TV, computer and all those other peripherals might be connected to the internet and talk to each other as well opening the largest door to media and IP content ever seen, heard or read.
Now you may not think “Philips” when you think “Custom Install” but the success of high-end Aurea TVs, Pronto remotes and other products makes a new day for the Dutch brand. When a customer insists on Aurea, you’ll find Philips NAS or Media Gateway becomes a piece of the puzzle.