I don’t think PoE will ever catch on.  Pretty much every PoE device I’ve ever worked with, that wasn’t an IP phone, came with it’s own wall wart.  Usually Ethernet into the wart, then one Ethernet/PoE cable to the device.  Only a slight bit neater.

And very, very few home routers, gateways, or switches provide power for PoE.  Adding PoE to the device, presuming it could get enough juice, would add cost.  And they’d still have to ship a wart for the majority of users.  So I can understand why they don’t use it.  A wart that does PoE would cost more than a standard off-the-shelf unit.

Which is also why I don’t see it catching on in the home.  Catch-22.  You’d need more devices with PoE support to drive routers & switches to include it, but router & switch vendors aren’t going to include it unless the demand is there.  Couple that with the move to Wireless – so less Ethernet in general – and I don’t see it happening.

A dongle that allows power to be injected into the Ethernet cable from a standard wall wart would seem an acceptable and cheap solution to help kick-start interest/raise awareness in PoE capable routers/switches. When devices are launched, like this TiVo transcoder, with only an RJ45 socket and a power socket, the argument against PoE seems rather perverse.

As to the point, with many low-power streamers now coming to market which would all be perfect for PoE, they could all (in the future) be powered from a single wall-wart courtesy of my PoE enabled network switch. There would be no need for a multitude of wall-warts, one for each networked device, when instead they could be drawing power from the ethernet cable.

For sideloading?  Sounds like I’d probably have to queue up a transfer, then wait an hour (or the length of the show), and tell it to save it.  Then queue up another one?  Ugh.  Sounds awful.

With TTG I can queue up a transfer ahead of time, and have it ready and waiting in iTunes for the next time I plug in my iPhone/iPad.  Or sync via Wi-Fi when I plug the thing in to charge overnight.  All pretty automatic.  Won’t work for premium/no copy content of course, but then I suspect neither will sideloading.

For streaming in the home?  Well, in the home I’ve got these big monitors called TVs that I can use.  So why do I need to stream to my iPad?  I guess as a personal monitor, when there aren’t enough TVs?  Doesn’t happen a lot in my house anyway. 

For streaming away from the home?  Well, that’s the killer app really, but the one TiVo may not support.  And for which I bought SlingBoxes that work pretty well.  This would be better than that because it wouldn’t take over the UI on the TV in question, which would be great.  But they’d have to prove their mettle wrt streaming over low bandwidth hotel WiFi and such.

I suspect it will be easy enough to VPN into your home network to force it to stream remotely, but if they haven’t dealt with the ABR streaming issues in their implementation it probably won’t work that well most of the time, so we’ll likely have to wait until they get around to supporting it.  If ever.

Honestly, more interested in the new “IP” box.  Lets see when that comes out, what price point it hits, how it handles live TV, whether it requires a cable card, what the monthly service fee is, etc.