Engadget: iHome iW2 and iW3 AirPlay wireless speakers hands-on sneak peek

iHome is busy making a line out of AirPlay. It's been a blast working on these.

Both systems are essentially identical internally, with two low-range drivers and two tweeters, but the iW2 is laid out horizontally, while the iW3 is a tower. Since they're designed to be cheaper fixed satellite speakers for around your house, they don't have internal batteries or the iW1's grab-and-go charger, but they do pick up Ethernet ports, and you can still use the new iHome Connect setup application. No word on price, but the iW1 is $300 and these are meant to be cheaper -- we'd guess $200 or so.

via engadget

iHome iW1 AirPlay wireless speaker hands-on

AirPlay audio launches, enabled by BridgeCo

Wireless audio streaming technology supplier, BridgeCo, was revealed over the last week to be the vendor providing AirPlay-enabling hardware to third-party speaker and audio system manufacturers. They are currently enabling iHome, Denon and others via their JukeBlox modular circuit design which contains a networked media processor at its core along with the mixed signal circuits required for carrying out home networking duties, required by AirPlay.

Note from BridgeCo that AirPlay requires numerous capabilities above and beyond a basic networking stack, including:

• Authentication, communication and streaming with iTunes Mac/PC
• Support for Apple “Remote” iPhone/iPad/iPod touch control and system interface/control commands
• Simplified network setup featuring WPS, JB Connect and Bonjour/uPnP discovery
• Fail-safe system code upgrade support options – internet direct, home network or USB
• System management web pages

BridgeCo's offering

The JukeBlox platform is capable of tons of stuff. However, Apple's AirPlay finally gives some rationalization to the market, in the form of clear marketing and huge installed base, for these streaming audio technologies in general. Even as Gene Sheridan, BridgeCo CEO notes in a CNBC article,

"(Apple) know(s) how to take a complex and feature-rich technology and narrow it." How narrow? Sheridan said after getting a peek inside, BridgeCo provided Apple with a long list of what it could offer the company. "They picked three."

Make no mistake, BridgeCo's ten years in networked audio has created a fairly large offering of pretty cool capabilities: Pandora and Rhapsody streaming, Sirius/XM, DLNA, UPnP. Going forward however, it is reasonable to assume the volume opportunities for BridgeCo will surpass and marginalize the relevance of the litany of non-AirPlay specific capabilities (however cool they are). Which for companies like iHome, and thus many mainstream consumers, means the AirPlay-enabling solution will become more cost-effective in time, as well. The hardware required to pull off all those nifty features ain't cheap, and as Apple said, they only need three of them!

All that aside, BridgeCo did their homework, stayed close to Apple, and when the opportunity finally availed itself, they struck and got the big design win for AirPlay audio. Commendable and impressive for a small company to not lose focus on where their volume opportunities resided.

What does it mean for product makers?

For product makers like iHome, it is vital to understand what BridgeCo's technology does and does not provide. Product makers spend a lot of time and effort to make features come to life and provide meaning to consumers in the context of their lifestyles. For AirPlay, it is no different. BridgeCo has to support and work to enable end-products to meet the requirements their makers define, balancing what is possible with what is meaningful. Product makers spend the majority of their time figuring out a product that:

• delivers the highlights of what AirPlay makes possible
• provides a simple out-of-box experience
• offers a bona-fide sound solution
• keeps the price of the product palatable

These make up the key challenges for defining a successful AirPlay product. So while Apple has opened up a protocol and provided key IP, and BridgeCo has implemented those features into a hardware module, there is still lots of work to make it appealing to end-users and market is succesfully before AirPlay or any of it's enabled products become widespread hits.

Take-away

It's a big multi-party effort to develop products in Apple's ecosystem, and for some companies, it's a great business. BridgeCo has wiggled in and carved out a sandbox that may also provide it a path to profitability that it's been seeking for the last decade.

For BridgeCo, which still isn't profitable (but hopes to be so by the second half of next year), the impact of the Apple deal is immense. It should provide more than half the company's revenues, though, even without the Apple deal, Sheridan says the company's backlog "is at an all-time high." Still, with 120 million people owning some sort of Apple i-product, the opportunities are "intimidating", and Sheridan has spent a good part of the last year lining up suppliers to make sure there won't be any manufacturing glitches.

It's execution time.

iHome AirPlay wireless speaker system is revealed on company teaser site

The iHome AirPlay wireless speaker teaser site is up. iHome has unveiled a completely new design for a completely new category of Apple audio accessory.

The picture and copy on the teaser site show a stereo all-in-one speaker design, with a metal base and black cloth grille. A capacitive touch panel on top rounds out the visible form-factor elements. The copy states that the speaker includes a rechargeable battery, which if you let your imagination run with it, means you can achieve a completely wireless listening experience using AirPlay, no strings attached.

AirPlay speakers will allow point-to-multipoint streaming of content from any iTunes 10 (or later) library running on Mac or Windows operating systems. As Apple mentioned on Wednesday, AirPlay functionality will also extend to the iPad, and presumably all iOS devices, when iOS 4.2 is released at the end of 2010. So users could stream audio directly from iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad to an AirPlay speaker.

AirPlay is the new name for AirTunes, the wireless audio technology that has been used for the past five-plus years by Apple to stream audio from iTunes to the Airport Express and Apple TV. Audio is streamed using Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC), meaning whatever format your audio is stored in within iTunes, if iTunes can play such a file, than it can send it via AirPlay, after it is "transcoded" to ALAC. Since ALAC is "lossless," it transmits the audio without any additional degradation, or music data loss, compared to the source file.

For the first time, this wireless audio functionality is now available to Apple's third-party licensed accessory makers, and iHome is one of these, being one of the most prolific in the space over the last five years.

AirPlay by Apple enables iHome, others, to bring wireless audio home

I've written about AirTunes in the past. Since late 2004, I've played with Apple's wireless audio technology as a feature of iTunes and the Airport Express. I never tried it in concert with Apple TV, but for a couple years, I enjoyed three separate zones of home audio using two AirPort Expresses and a Mac mini. In the context of offering a solution for simple music playback across the home, it has always been a great solution.

For those who don't know, AirTunes lets people stream music from any computer running iTunes to any AirTunes receiver located on the same local-area network. So you could have AirTunes receivers (up until now, only the AirPort Express and Apple TV), in any number of rooms in your house, and using iTunes, or an app from Apple called Remote, control what music is sent where. Users could then listen to music from any audio system plugged into either of their AirTunes devices, which presented basic line-level audio signals.

Well, today was a big day. Widely reported elsewhere, Apple announced a host of new products in their latest keynote address (new iPods, new Apple TV, iTunes 10, and an iOS 4.2 preview). Layered into the announcement was the fact that AirTunes has now been "re-branded" as part of a larger wireless media feature-set from Apple, newly dubbed AirPlay, which also encompasses video and photo sending around the home.

The AirPlay story is embellished by their website and press release, and is the feature most relevant to wirelessaudioblog readers. Apple announced that AirPlay speakers and audio systems will soon be available from third-party manufacturers. iHome, Denon, Marantz, JBL, and Bowers & Wilkins are all now readying systems that will use AirPlay to receive audio from a user's iTunes library, and when iOS 4.2 releases later this year, it seems as though AirPlay speakers might receive audio directly from many tens of millions of portable iOS devices. This wasn't super explicit during the keynote, but would seem reasonable.

After working in the wireless audio category for 6 years, it's gratifying to see the technology get situated for wide-spread adoption. The fact is, the Apple team is a band of user-experience aficionados, but as we all also know, they are commercially brilliant as well. So there is finally real hope that more people will realize some of the promises of wireless audio for multi-room home audio networking. By opening up AirPlay to third party accessory makers, Apple opens the door for more affordable, lifestyle focused product concepts to reach the masses. For product makers that have been wrestling with existing wireless audio technologies – home-grown wireless audio solutions (i.e. Logitech, Sonos), RF ASIC-based solutions from STS or Avnera (Klipsch, Panasonic, Sony, Best Buy) – AirPlay is offered as a technology solution that not only has Apple's robust wireless audio protocol inside, but also the promise of Apple's market-making, 3rd party developer support. The accompanying marketing platform is composed of strong messaging from Apple and a huge installed-base of complimentary AirPlay products, i.e. Apple's iTunes, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch...

Readers of wirelessaudioblog know I work in product development now at iHome. One of our most exciting projects this year has been designing and developing our first AirPlay speaker. Apple's technology enables us to deliver a product that is uniquely wireless, uniquely AirPlay, and particularly beneficial to existing iPod, iPhone, iPad customers, i.e. iTunes users. The iHome AirPlay wireless speaker will reach the market this holiday season, and it offers consumers the ability to send iTunes audio to any room of the house, multiple rooms of the house, and control it all with Apple's Remote app for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

I'm really excited to see AirPlay mature in this way, because it's always been an impressive, promising take on wireless audio. Now Apple has put the full commitment of their third-party hardware developer support team behind it. This should keep things really interesting, and I'm actually really looking forward to see what other device-makers have planned.