There are no signs that the growth in Digital Home Networking will slow down anytime soon. It is likely that more attention will be directed to this market in the coming years as home networks become increasingly common.

Home Media servers sit at the center for the home network. As such, Home Media Server market is driven by the digital home networking market. Data from all the main server makers in Taiwan and South Korea, who manufacture the servers for such companies as HP, IBM, Dell, and Sun Microsystems, indicate that the market growing fast. Similarly several companies have sprung up in mainland China to serve the same market.

Industry experts have predicted that demand for basic media servers will grow by over 60% by 2010, while demand for advanced media servers is expected to grow by close to 60% by then.

Such media servers have to be seamlessly interoperable with a variety of other devices that comes into contact with home network. In addition given ever evolving nature of digital media formats, they have to support software that can handle variety of such formats. Content providers have also demanded that some content protection mechanisms against piracy be built into these servers. Enhanced security against unauthorized use and break-ins is also paramount. Another feature that may have demand is the ability to create backups and carry out maintenance through remote login, so that the servers can be maintained by remote service providers.

A manufacturers’ alliance called Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) sets the general guidelines for future direction of the home media servers.

Some of the new Home Media Players, Home Theatre Systems, and other such devices, do have some server capability built into them. However this is not expected to retard the demand for dedicated Home Media Servers on the long run.

To conclude, all the signs indicate that we can expect lot of market driven innovation and increasing ease of use in Digital Home Networking.