Deutsche Telekom Lets Users Store Personal Files, emails Centrally, Access Them on Three Screens

Deutsche Telekom, the German incumbent telco that offers the Microsoft Mediaroom-powered IPTV service, T-Home Entertain, announced Thursday that it has launched a service that allows customers to store videos, photos, music and other personal media files, as well as personal contact lists and email, "centrally and securely" in a "Media Center" located on its networks, and then access them and play them back through their TV, mobile phone or PC. The service, which was announced at CeBIT in February, also allows them to share their content with their family and friends, the company says.

According to Deutsche Telekom, the new service offers a "simple and intuitive" standard interface and a unified registration-login process across all three screens, allowing customers to use it "intuitively on any device, without the hassle of having to adapt to a new mode of operation every time." It says that the service's Share function, for example, enables customers to send photos and videos simply by clicking a button; and that the photos and videos then appear on the recipient's TV (if the recipient is also a T-Home Entertain customer), computer or mobile screen in exactly the same format as was chosen by the sender: "in a neat row, in a wildly creative design a la 'postcard stuck to the refrigerator,' or as a browsable photo album." The service also automatically saves contact data from users' mobile phones to a central location, allowing them to pull up their contact lists remotely on the TV or PC. Meanwhile, the service's ability to store music files will launch "soon," Deutsche Telekom says, adding that "users will simply upload songs on a computer and retrieve their favorite hits whenever they want on a cell phone, PC or TV set via the T-Home Entertain media receiver." The Media Center that is at the core of the new service can be accessed at telekom.de/mediencenter. According to Deutsche Telekom, it allows users to set up a personal storage space, regardless of whether or not they are customers.