Consumer industry moves Linux to the living room

Consumer electronics companies want to leverage
the trend toward adding value to consumer electronics through software
to create a Linix-based “living room operating system.”

At this week’s CeBIT show here, Philips unveiled several reference
designs for media players and other consumer electronics device
platforms. The reference designs have one thing in common: They all
use Philips’ own Nexperia media processor. However, the company does
not want to push its own processor, but rather wants to provide a
unified platform for the industry. The new reference designs are
hardware-independent, said Paul de Bot, vice president of business
development at Philips Semiconductor.

The lion’s share of future consumer electronics’ technical development
will be software related. “The amount of available software triples
every three years. That means that the software section can keep up
with Moore’s Law easily,” de Bot said.