Consumers today can choose from WHDI, wireless HD, WiDi, wireless USB and Wi-Fi Direct. Confused? Check out our guide to these emerging wireless streaming-media technologies.

WHDI

Wireless Home Digital Interface, or WHDI, was finalized in 2009 to give consumers a way to link the PC to the TV. Think of it as the wireless equivalent of HDMI. The technology has a latency of less than 1 millisecond, which means it’s good enough not just for watching movies but should also work well to stream games from your browser to the TV.

WHDI can stream 1080p video at up to 3 Gbps (gigabits per second). All you need is a wireless HDI dongle that can plug into your laptop and a little receiver that goes behind the TV. That set will cost about $150 and will be available early next year.

Meanwhile, TV makers such as Sharp and LG are rolling out TVs with built-in support for WHDI standard.

Slowly, the WHDI consortium hopes to convince PC makers integrate WHDI chips into laptops, similar to the way Wi-Fi chips are built in today.

WirelessHD

While other wireless technologies focus on streaming content from the PC to the TV, WirelessHD targets the most common electronic eyesore in homes: the black HDMI cables that snake out from behind the TV towards the set-top box, PC or the DVD player.

If built into TV sets, WirelessHD can offer fast data transfers of up to 10 GBps to 28 Gbps. That makes it the fastest of the lot for point-to-point data transfer.

So far, TV makers such as Panasonic, LG and Vizio have said they will offer wireless-HD–enabled sets by the end of the year.

Wireless USB

When the familiar USB port decides to go wireless, it means steaming-media companies can piggyback on to a powerful, widely understood technology.

Wireless USB is based on the Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radio platform. It can send data at speeds of 480 Mbps at distances of up to 10 feet and 110 Mpbs at up to 32 feet. Companies such as Logitech already offer UWB-based kits that can be used to connect your PC to the TV.

A startup called Veebeam launched a box that uses wireless USB to stream internet video from your laptop to the TV.

Wireless USB is more powerful for point-to-point connectivity than traditional Wi-Fi, because it offers more bandwidth and less interference, says Veebeam. It estimates 420 Mbps bandwidth for its wireless USB implementation.

WiGig

Picture yourself downloading a 25-GB Blu-ray disc in less than a minute. That’s what WiGig can do for you, says the Wireless Gigabit Alliance. The Alliance is a consortium of electronics companies that has established a specification for a wireless technology. WiGig could offer users data-transfer speeds ranging from 1 Gbps to 6 Gbps — or at least 10 times faster than today’s Wi-Fi.

The alliance had hoped to make WiGig commonplace by the end of the year, but it has been slow going for the standard, which has not been implemented in any consumer products.

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Authors: Priya Ganapati

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