Wanted: one place to storeall those digital files, from hit songs to home movies

LAS VEGAS -- The gadget makers who gathered here last week for the Consumer Electronics Show want to make it easier and more alluring for you to create and collect digital media.

Google introduced a video download service, and Microsoft, with an assist from pop idol Justin Timberlake and MTV, cut the ribbon on an online music store called Urge. Kodak showed off a new digital camera with two lenses, and Sony trotted out a palm-sized high-definition video camera.

But once you've got all those digital songs, TV shows, still photos, and movies (some of it produced by you, some by big media companies), what exactly do you do with them?

We're all starting to resemble squirrels with lots of acorns and no good place to stash them: Our digital files are scattered across PCs at home and at work, our cameras and video cameras, CDs and DVDs, USB keychain drives and SD cards, and, increasingly, portable devices such as cell phones, PlayStation Portables, and iPods.

Several companies at the Consumer Electronics Show were aiming to solve that problem and sell you some new hardware and services in the process. Most of them set up fantasy living rooms in the Las Vegas Convention Center to present their solutions, which resembled sitcom sets, complete with couches, coffee tables, and massive plasma screen TVs. Lacking is the clutter: pizza boxes, empty mugs, and dog-eared mail-order catalogs.

Most of the storage products are very unglamorous-looking black boxes, a bit chunkier than a standard DVD player. They might be thought of as digital file cabinets, though marketers have given them sexier names, such as the Kaleidescape Entertainment Server, or Sony's Vaio XL1 Digital Living System.

Michael Fasulo, chief marketing officer for Sony Electronics, touted his company's product as ''a stylish solution that deserves a place in each of your living rooms." List price: $2,299. (TV not included.)

Sony's Digital Living System, just like the Digital Entertainment Center presented by Hewlett-Packard, is based on software from Microsoft called Windows XP Media Center Edition. That software enables you to use a remote control to navigate through lists of your MP3s and digitally recorded TV shows and even combine your digital photos with music to create slick-looking slide shows. (Despite the whiz-bangery, forcing friends to sit through 500 snapshots from your last cruise is probably still illegal under the Geneva Conventions.)

Hewlett-Packard's device has so many slots that can be used for importing digital content -- FireWire, USB, Memory Stick, Compact Flash, Microdrive -- that I was surprised not to see a vacuum cleaner extension for sucking stray digital bits from underneath the sofa cushions.

One of the happiest men at the show was Bill Watkins, the chief executive of Seagate Technology. His company's hard drives go inside the Digital Entertainment Center and many of the other digital file cabinets being sold.

''From our perspective, we're kind of like an arms dealer," he said. ''These devices are becoming more important as people look for ways to manage and control all this digital content. And they all need a hard drive."

At his own home, Watkins uses a system from Kaleidescape to manage his DVD collection. ''I've got two terabytes of DVDs on it," he said. ''But it's an expensive system, and I had to hire a home entertainment guy to put it together."

Kaleidescape's interface is beautiful. Click on a DVD cover (''Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid") and the screen instantly groups similar movies around it (''Unforgiven). But the systems -- which are popular with Hollywood directors and studio execs -- start at $22,000. And they don't yet handle digital photos or content downloaded from the Net.

Many electronics companies believe that all your digital goodies should sit on a box inside your house, and if you need access to them outside of the home, you'd use the Internet to connect to that box. (Devices such as the Slingbox from Sling Media or Sony's LocationFree TV, for instance, allow you to ''beam" your own cable channels over the Net from Boston to a hotel room in Tokyo)

But others, such as Todd Porter of Diversified Media in Dallas, think that consumers might want to pay a monthly fee to keep their content on a box outside the home that's managed by a service provider; that way, someone else handles the technical support.

''Having content on a server outside the home is simple," says Porter, whose company makes software to manage digital video. ''Anytime somebody has to get on their knees and mess with wires behind a piece of furniture, you don't have a mass market. This has to be painless."

None of the devices available today is painless or offers a complete solution to the squirrel-with-too-many-acorns dilemma. (Those from Sony and HP, based on Microsoft's software, come closest.) Watkins says, ''It's not yet apparent to me who wins this battle."

Back in 2000, a Waltham start-up company called Memora tried to solve the problem of storing and organizing digital media; their product, the Servio Personal Server, organized music, photos, videos, and e-mail.

But the company never attracted venture capital funding and eventually shut down. Like many technology companies, they tried to solve a problem before consumers realized they had it.

I can't help recalling the classic George Carlin routine, ''A Place for My Stuff." (''That's all your house is: a place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time.")

Carlin recorded that album back in 1981. What we need today is a place for all our digital stuff.

Scott Kirsner is a freelance writer in San Francisco who maintains a blog on entertainment and technology, cinematech.blogspot.com. He can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com.