You need a home network.

When you set up your media, lighting and other controls for use by remote from any room, you won't be alone. Nearly a third of all US households will have an entertainment network by 2010, according to a July 2006 study by Parks Associates.

New data from Harris Interactive show that 39% of US adults already have a home network of some sort, although many of these are WiFi networks designed to let laptops access the Internet wirelessly on a shared household connection.

Now it's just a matter of sending media over those wireless connections, which is exactly what Apple wants to do with its soon-to-debut AppleTV device.

Besides widespread current home network usage, Harris also found that those who already have home networks want to improve them.

According to the Harris survey, 37% of those with home networks said they would like to use their PCs as media centers to control their entertainment systems, and 31% would use them to download pictures, video and music to their televisions.

Digital homes, of which home networks are a part, have a bad reputation. Most consumers in a January 2007 study by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates and Hill & Knowlton thought that digital homes were too expensive and too difficult to set up. The desire to get media from the PC to the living room is likely to help change that perception.

The fact is that WiFi and entertainment networks are likely to remain the main driver of digital home-related revenues.

The challenge for marketers is familiar: education. Making digital home and home networking components easy to set up and work together securely is one step. Communicating all of that to consumers is the next.

How many things are Internet users doing at once? Find out by reading eMarketer's Multitasking Consumers: Distracted or Connected? report.