You mentioned iStream, and let's talk about that for a minute. As you mentioned, it's an an app for the iPhone that let's you stream music, photos, and video to an iPhone or iPod Touch. Talk about the impat that has.

This is my favorite new feature in the update... I'm an iPhone user and obviously a heavy media enthusiast that lives and breathes this stuff. I have a ton of content in my home, a lot of photos, a lot of video, and though maybe not as big a music collection as some but certainly thousands of songs, and I've got the eight-gigabyte iPhone. With my home server now hooked up, which is a fully loaded server with four one-terabyte drives, I really have, if you think about it, a four-terabyte iPhone. Anywhere I go I can stream all my content to this iPhone.

I can give you a good example. My family and I were driving down to Denver over the weekend recently and wanted to listen to some music. The radio stations weren't coming in very good where we were, so I plugged my iPhone into the cassette adapter that I have, and handed it back to my kids. The whole way down they were browsing our entire music collection and selecting the songs they wanted to hear. Not just the few hundred songs that I might have synced to my iPhone, but truly everything I had back on my home server was available. So that was pretty powerful. When we got to our destination there were a lot of relatives we hadn't seen in a while, and I was able to pull up some recent video clips we had taken and show them to people, streaming right off my server, not having to sync the videos to my iPhone. So, it's a really, really compelling application for those who have a home server and an iPhone.

So, you're saying the MediaSmart Server is now an iPhone/iPod Touch accessory that every iPhone and Touch user should have.

I really hope so. (laughs) It is free and you can either download iStream to your iPhone directly or you can go through iTunes and download it that way. I've been fortunate enough to be testing this for some time, and have found it to be just a really, really compelling app for my iPhone. [Read the MediaSmart Home iStream Review | Learn about iStream at HP.com]

This is great for people who own an iPhone or iPod Touch, but what about other mobile devices? Any love coming to Windows Mobile, Android, or even the Palm Pre when that comes out?

All that is something that is part of our consideration set. The one thing you can do on some other platforms is that you can at least download the mobile quality version of videos, or music and photos if you have the right formats, and certainly load it to those devices. As of now though, the iPhone is the only streaming mobile platform that we're supporting. We're continuing to look at other mobile platforms and listen to user feedback, and then decide what the course is from there.

Let's talk about the home server market for a minute. Interest in this space is really picking up, and we're starting to see more competition enter the marketplace. Is a lot of the reason HP is working on these unique features, like Video Converter and iStream, to help differentiate the MediaSmart Server from all other Windows Home Server products? How do you feel HP is poised to compete going forward?

That's a really good question. First off, personally, I'm glad to see there's new Windows Home Server products coming into the market because I think it's helping further legitimize this category of products. I think other companies seeing this opportunity is only going to be good for us in the long run. I think that similar to what we've done with other products at HP, like with TouchSmart, we innovate on top of the core operating system. That is absolutely our philosophy with Windows Home Server as well. We want to take the core of the Windows Home Server operating system and then provide distinct added value on top of that.

That said, I can't say that what we've done so far is in any response to competition, per say. More just a philosophy to say, "If we want to build this category and get people excited about it, we have to build really compelling applications that are going to solve real problems." And so, we've touched on several of those already today, and we've got others. We know there are a lot of customers out there using these in home office environments, and those customers are the types of people who want to make sure they have off-site capability of their data as well. And with features like our Amazon S3 online backup, that's exactly who was targeted ... people who want an extra layer of protection that isn't onsite.

Anything we do, we are really designing it around, "What's the customer problem we're solving? Is there a market out there that needs that capability?" I think we're hitting the right things, not to say there aren't a lot more out there we can do and enhancements we can make on existing features. I think you'll find whether there's three competitors or thirty competitors, HP is going to continue to look at this platform in terms of what we can do to add value on top of it, and hopefully ship the best possible products for our customers.

Speaking of enhancements, there was a lot of new stuff added to the EX-485 and EX-487 when they debuted, and now this update adds even more features. First generation customers of the EX-470 and EX-475 were told they would get the Mac backup features and Amazon S3, which still hasn’t come out (as of when this interview occurred). HP has been pretty adamant that no other features would be back-ported to first gen customers, but then they changed their mind. Why the hesitation and sudden change of heart?

Customer feedback is very important to our team, and we saw the way first generation customers reacted to the 2.5 software update announcement, and how eager they were to also get the additional features. As such, we made a decision to provide a supported path to allow customers to update all generations of EX Series and LX Series MediaSmart Server products to the new software version in the fall timeframe.

However, what's important to note here is that due to the generational differences of our platform architectures, we won't be providing the updated software as a traditional download, but instead will provide a complete server image DVD through HP support. We do anticipate some hardware limitations and/or trade-offs for the various platforms, which will be detailed further when the new server DVDs are available.

We also still have plans to deliver the original update of both Amazon S3 and Mac Time Machine capability for EX-470 and EX-475.

When do you think that [Amazon S3 and Mac Time Machine] will be available?

In May. I don't have an exact date yet since we need to get it staged in part of the broader HP update cycle, but we are confident that it will be in May.

Let's move on to the future. Where does HP plan on taking the MediaSmart Server? Can you give us any thoughts or insights as to what may be coming down the road?

HP doesn't speak on unannounced or future products, so I can't really comment on what may be coming down the road. However, I can touch again on our philosophy around this platform, which is to innovate in areas that are going to solve real customer problems, and are going to solve those problems in a way that's unique to a home server platform. In other words, we aren't just going to do something that can be easily done with a PC - we try to add value and show the benefits of using a home server.

When we think of product development on the MediaSmart Server, we're thinking about three pillars: one is data protection, one is sharing, and the third is entertainment. We look at all of those pillars lying on a foundation of ease of use, so even though we could come out with a really cool data protection feature, if it's too hard to use we're not going to do it. Similarly, if we have an idea for something that would really enhance the ease of use but is not anything that's really compelling in terms of the aforementioned pillars, we may not include that either. Like I said earlier, we really strive to eliminate customer pain points and make the experience of using a home server enjoyable.

Overall, I think we've made some really great strides within these pillars from generation one to generation two of the product. We've added some compelling features that are useful for both the consumer and home business segments, and we hope to continue to build upon those innovations. We will continue to do research and listen to customer feedback to see what else we can do to make the MediaSmart Server even better.

Thank you Allen for taking the time to speak with us today.

No problem! It was my pleasure.

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