Nearly every Service Provider we speak with is looking to offer his customers with various digital services: for Wi-Fi Diagnostics, IoT Protection, Parental Control and others. Instead of integrating these services on the in-home router, which is the typical approach taken today, we allow Service Providers to deploy these services from their data center. This means an end to protracted software integration efforts and field upgrades and an end to finger-pointing when bugs happen. It also means that older equipment, already deployed in the field may offer the same level of services as newer models. In fact, we see this as the only viable way of creating a scalable and sustainable offering of services.

Lots, actually. We have integrated several standard 3rd party services (our first was F-Secure SENSE for Parental Control and IoT Protection) and developed some of our own. Given that we’re at the data center, memory is no longer an issue and the sky becomes the limit.

Today, we’d like to introduce you to a service we wrote ourselves and is attracting lost of attention. We call it CloudDLNA. Cloud storage accounts are pretty much ubiquitous. Dropbox, Google Drive or hundreds of others provide us with a convenient and cheap way of storing our stuff: music, photos, videos or just documents. But what if I want to watch a home video, for example, on the TV in my lounge room. My TV is probably networked, but how can I stream a video file to it?

There are ways, but not simple ones. At least until CloudDLNA.
 

 

CloudDLNA esides in your home router (virtually speaking – it’s actually on a server somewhere) and lets your TV access all multi-media information on your standard cloud storage account via DLNA. That means no clients need be installed on the TV – all information is immediately available. (Assuming, of course that the TV has a network connection). In fact apart from enabling the service and providing some basic one-time configuration information, there is nothing to do at all.

It’s a rather simple service but a useful and practical one.

In coming blogs, we’ll share other types of services we are offering (or working on offering) via our Virtual Services.