Balaji Baktha, general manager of the Embedded and Emerging business unit at Marvell; Tim Bratton, general manager for wireless music delivery at RealNetworks; Neil Hamady, director of marketing at Bermai, Inc. and Bob Starr, vice president of business development at QSound Labs all agreed that there could indeed be a "killer app" for the electronics industry, and that it would break from previous patterns of market explosion in consumer electronics.

"There is growth coming, but it is not one next big thing,'' said Baktha. "Instead, it is lots of little things combining into one system."

Previous breakthrough consumer products have been isolated appliances, the panel observed, such as the portable cassette player, the CD player, DVD player and even the cell phone. But Starr agreed with Baktha that this pattern was changing. He said that today we are in the early stages of an entirely new kind of consumer explosion — a converged product instead of a stand-alone appliance.

The example Starr pointed to was the cellphone, which he said is combining the functions of telephone, portable game console, locating device, PDA, digital camera and digital video recorder into a single package with a single user interface. "This is not theoretical. High-end cellular handsets are already outselling PDAs in Europe," Starr said.

But the convergence that excited the panel was not in the hand, but in the home. "As digital media replace analog media throughout the home, something interesting is happening," Baktha said. "Digital content is portable, it's not confined to a particular physical player like a phonograph or CD deck. You can store and acquire it in a central location and then move it to wherever you want to experience it."

This thinking is leading rapidly to an entirely new configuration for home entertainment and information, the panel agreed. A single device would become the gateway to an external broadband network, a media storage center and the hub of a home wireless media network, distributing high-definition video, still images and music throughout the premises.

But both technical and societal issues must still be resolved. On the technical side, Bermai's Hamady reviewed the networking requirements for such a system. ''Today there are two divergent views of the home-PC-centric and consumer-electronics-centric," Hamady said. "Either the PC or a consumer appliance such as the set-top box could win, or both could coexist. But however the network emerges, it must be robust, low in cost and must support streaming media at relatively high speeds."

Hamady further suggested that fixed wireless would emerge as the broadband connection to the home, and that MIMO (multi-input, multi-output) wireless systems would form the media network within the home.

Baktha added that the volume of storage that would be required of the media gateway would be enormous. Real's Bratton quickly agreed. "I recently started saving video clips from my digital video recorder on a hard drive," Bratton related. "I've already filled up a 200-GByte drive."

Panelists agreed that as the home media center takes off, it will become the driving market for mass storage and storage-area networking, dwarfing the enterprise market, and with huge consequences for the rotating media and SAN industries. "There are already people building hierarchical storage networks with mixed magnetic and optical storage for home media," Baktha said.

Legal access to content will be another major hurdle, but that, too is being surmounted, according to Bratton. The executive described a service now in operation in the U.S., by which for a fixed monthly fee RealNetworks makes available on demand 35,000 CDs, all under license from their producers.

He offered this as proof that industry attitudes toward content protection are rapidly shifting, and that the industry is willing to accept freedom of personal use and even some sophisticated piracy in exchange for an inexpensive, easy licensing system that creates a mass market for their content.