Home, Office, Automobile, Mobile - these things have never really shared environments.
Even at home, there are few people who connect their audio systems to the TV.
This means that in the analog environment each individual feature exists independently and complete by itself.

This is 'normal', so we do not feel any inconvenience from it, but once you have a doubt about this 'normality', many inconveniences become clear.
For example, if you think of something while watching TV, you can only choose to go away from the TV, or do it later. If you could just open a side window as on a PC, and check the weather for tomorrow or check for email, it would probably be useful.
And if you wanted to use the data for something else, having to gather other devices to match the situation is not efficient.
For example, when you've recorded a music television show on new year's eve, and you want to hear it in your car during the new years holiday, it is too much trouble to convert it to MD or cassette - not many would do such a thing. When you're listening to a CD at home, you play it on a stereo system, but when you're walking around, you record it onto an MD. When you go out for a drive, you can't take your stereo from home so you have another CD player or MD player in your car. This is normal nowadays, but when you think about it, you're readying the same device for 3 different situations. And both the CD and MD are for music and can't be used for anything else. There is a "shape" to reach an objective, and that shape is becoming the restricting factor.

Digitalization is spreading rapidly now. It is now possible to remove these "normal" restrictions that have been placed all at once. The music TV show that was recorded on DVD can now be listened to in the car as audio. Music recorded on a memory card can be listened to in the house, in the car navigation, in the cellular phone or even secretly at the computer at work. Once we become accustomed to this kind of usefulness we'll probably never go back.

With devices gaining this kind of variety, the recording media, and especially the interface between units become very important. Recording media is of course useful, but changing between media is tiresome. A connection through an interface allows sharing, and those devices will work as if they had those features, making it very useful. For certain devices, it is hoped that they can interconnect according to the situation.
For example, if your child is playing a TV game at home, and you try to take them out on an errand by car, he or she may say "After I'm done---------.", causing an argument. What if your car had the same interface, and it was possible to continue playing on the navigation or the TV screen in the car? Your child will be content. And if it is a common interface, where they can be connected without much thought, children and elderly persons can use these devices easily.
Internet shopping on television and the like are very useful for the handicapped or the elderly to begin with, and it should allow them to do things like shop at a local supermarket's internet site for meat and vegetables, to make dinner with.

The reason Mitsubishi Rayon has pushed the IEEE1394 since 1995 as the best interface for the multimedia age is because with it's user-friendly interface, it can respond to the new applications and the needs of the digital age for some time to come, and most of all, because it holds a lot of very promising possibilities that make us exited.
And our plastic optical fibers which will form communication routes, will be in your home and in your car before you even know it.

MITSUBISHI RAYON CO., LTD.
Optical Fiber Department
6-41, Konan 1-chome, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8506, JAPAN
Phone: +81 3 5495 3060