Английский язык: Аннотирование и реферирование текста

227 internet firms such as Yahoo!, networking-equipment companies such as Cisco – all agree that the digital home is where the action will be and are investing furiously to make sure they have a good chance of playing a leading role. Their first challenge in stimulating any sort of consumer interest is the difficulty of merely explaining what the digital home is supposed to be. You might think, for instance, that the term refers to the long- established trend away from analogue and towards digital media. In music, most people have completed their migration from vinyl records and tapes to digital CDs. In films, the trend from videotapes to DVDs is not far behind. In photography, traditional film is fast being replaced by digital cameras and pictures. TV and radio broadcasters are also shift- ing to digital transmissions, with Britain leading the way. Confusingly, however, that is not what vendors mean when they talk about the digital home. Instead, they invariably mean a home in which all sorts of electronic devices – from the personal computer (PC) to the TV set-top box, the stereo, the game console and, in some ver- sions, even the garage door and refrigerator – are connected, both to one another and to the internet. Hence the Motorola marketing video that Mr. Burke was showing. Its purpose was to illustrate what Mo- torola, like Microsoft, calls "seamlessness", as digital content hops automatically between various devices and screens. The excitement, therefore, is not so much about content being digital, but about its de- livery switching from physical things (such as CDs) to photons (such as wireless downloads or streaming), because this requires consumers to buy new gadgets. Believers in this future point to encouraging statistics. Parks As- sociates, a research firm in Texas that specialises in the digital home (and which organised the conference at which Mr. Burke gave his key- note address) surveyed a group of internet users and found that 84 % of them use their PCs to store digital photos, 59 % to store music, 36 % for video clips and 26 % for personal videos. If one includes devices