First and second generation MediaSmart Server owners have been taken through a roller-coaster of product launches, updates, and major announcements over the past month. With such a flurry of activity, we reached out to HP's Allen Buckner to talk a little about the what's been happening across the entire MediaSmart Server line, and share a little insight in to how HP approaches the on-going development and evolution of their Home Server products.

MW: Hi Allen. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. For those who don't know you, could you take a brief minute to introduce yourself and explain how you're involved with the MediaSmart Server?

AB: Thanks Matt. As you said, my name is Allen Buckner, and I'm the Marketing Manager for the Home Server Group at HP. It's my team's job to basically do the product definition on what we want our home server products to do. We base that on a lot of the customer research we do. For example, we do primary research where we bring in focus groups of customers and talk to them about their media usage in the home and what they want to be able to do; basically what their pain points are. Then we take that feedback and create the product requirements, and on the back-end we work with our R&D team to make sure those features get developed in a way that matches back to those customer's needs.

The other source of input, of course, is the secondary research that includes not only the third party analyst community that provides us with input, but also the forums and blogs like MediaSmart Home where we read customer comments and feedback, then bring that back into our product development process as well.

HP released their second generation server back in December, and the LX line just a short time ago. How have these new products been received? Are you finding that more people are jumping on board now that HP has gotten more than one generation of product under their belts?

I think the product has been extremely well received. The main area we use to help quantify this is through product reviews. A couple notable ones include the Best of Show Award we got at MacWorld back in January and the PC Magazine Editor's Choice award. Both of those really point to the fact that we continue to innovate and create a really nice package with the home server product. And, I think the other area that really speaks to this is the feedback in not only blogs, but also the customer ratings and comments that we get on a lot of our partner e-tail sites; a lot of the feedback there has been overwhelmingly positive.

We were able to learn a few things from the first generation MediaSmart Server. We were able, just within our own group, to advance our thinking around what the features of the second generation Server should do. We had a lot more research to base it on. Thus far we've been, it's safe to say, pretty thrilled with the feedback we've heard and the response we've been getting.

Fantastic, that's great to hear. Moving forward, I'd say it's safe to say anyone reading this probably knows what a MediaSmart Server is (if you don't click here), so let's talk about the 2.5 update for the EX-485 and EX-487. Lot's of brand new features came out in this update, and a lot of media focused things around video and entertainment. Can you walk us through all the new stuff in 2.5, tell us how they work, and how they came to be.

As I mentioned a minute ago, we did a lot of customer research as we set out to improve upon our first generation server. A lot of that research involved sitting in and talking with customers, and we found that there was a lot of frustration around video, like compatibility and playback of video. We listened to these interviews, took notes, digested all that data, and then really set out to focus in on the video problems in the home. We broke them down into three main problems.

The first is videos people have that play fine on their PCs, their notebooks and their desktops, but when they go try to play them elsewhere, like streaming them to their XBOX or Playstation 3, they don't work. So our solution to that is the video transcoder, and we'll talk more about that in a minute.

The second problem is that more and more people want to take content on the go. It certainly started with music and then expanded to photos, and now it's also video. They want to sync that up to mobile devices and take it with them. Everybody has seen people on the plane watching a movie on their iPhone or their iPod Touch, so the second area we wanted to help with was "if you've got a mobile device, let's create a mobile version of the video that is going to work well on the mobile device."

Now that's also tied back to the video transcoder. The interesting thing about both of those issues is that there's PC software out there today that you can use to convert video, but it's taking a lot of cycles from your PC, is oftentimes difficult to use, and those video files, especially if you're going for the high quality version, take a really large amount of space on your hard drive. A home server, kind of by contrast, offers some real distinct advantages. First, you've got a device that, if you configure it to do so, will stay on twenty-four-seven. It's often not doing tasks that whole time. At some points, it might just be doing the backups in the middle of the night and then it's idle for a long time. You might be doing some media streaming, then it sits idle for a long time. So we created this video converter, a background process, that can run all the time pause when there's other things going on, but then resume or take a lower priority if there's enough bandwidth available to do that. So you've got this device sitting there that can crank away these video files around the clock, without the customer having to worry about it taking up their CPU cycles or taking up a lot of hard disk space, because the other advantage to a home server is that there's a lot of disk space available. Plus, it's easy to expand both internally and externally, so you've got a lot of storage to hold all these video files.

So you're saying that the home server is one of the more ideal devices to do this kind of work on because it normally is sitting idle anyway, it's got a lot of space, and even if you need to use your home server, it's not affecting your performance at all given how it's been implemented.

That's a good way to recap it. We looked at the problems and said, you know, one of the things we don't want to do is re-create something you can do on a PC when there's no real value add from doing it on the server. In this case, we saw a real value add due to the amount of disk space, and because video encoding is such an intensive task, the amount of free CPU cycles going unused. It really is an ideal device to do these sorts of things.

Then, the third part is that we have a very robust media streamer built in. So, once these files are converted, they now should be available to you to stream in and away from home. And that really gets to the third area, which is that people are getting more used to having anywhere access to their content. In the case of personal video collections, if you have it on the home server, there's really no reason you shouldn't be able to get that when you're away from home. And so, we added video to our remote media streamer to compliment the music and photos access that was already there.

So that's kind of the big video story, but there's a couple other areas worth mentioning. One is the iStream application, which is an app for the iPhone or iPod Touch that allows you to access your server from that platform. Then there were a number of enhancements to some of our existing EX-485 and EX-487 software. We improved some of the mobile streaming experiences, so if you look at the user interface on the Media Streamer app it's more robust. We made some minor improvements in the Media Collector so you can now see the status of the different media that you're gathering across your home. And we also made some enhancements to the Time Machine configuration so that it's a little easier for people to use. Oh, and we heard loud and clear that people liked the photo publisher, but wanted the ability to make albums private. So, we added that capability as well.

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