The 2008 edition of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was filled with events, as Bill Gates announced his partial renouncement at his role in Microsoft and the battle between the HD-DVD and the Blu-Ray format. But one of the main events was the announcement of Netgear on Sunday that it has delivered a system that allows wireless storage and distribution of digital content throughout the home.

"Our customers in their homes or small offices should be able to utilize high-speed broadband networking for any application, including communications, information gathering or entertainment, from any corner of the house without any interruption," said Patrick Lo, chairman, chief executive and founder of Netgear.

The new products will make home networking as "ubiquitous and intuitive as heat or electricity," Lo said, while a Netgear executive was demonstrating the qualities of the new devices, simultaneously wireless streaming of a high- definition movie, live HD gaming and video downloading. Even a hard drive was removed from the storage device without hurting the picture quality at all.

Among the new products is the RangeMax Dual Band Wireless N Router with a new "meta-material" antenna technology that was developed by NetGear. It has eight antennas that ensure great streaming even with interference from other wireless devices such as microwaves ovens, phones or other Wi-Fi networks. The router also has a button that sets up an automatic secure connection between the router and any other standard client, while usually, with other devices, users have to run a software application in order to set up secure connections.

NetGear also unveiled the ReadyNAS Duo media server, which can store any digital media, while it brings an unusual feature, as it supports hot swapping, allowing users to remove one of the drives without interrupting an ongoing streaming or other use of the device. In addition, ReadyNAS Duo has four hard- drive bays with a 4 terabytes of data capacity.

The HD/Gaming 5GHz Wireless-N networking kit was presented by the company, a device that is designated to upgrade an existing network in order to deliver high- performance video. The kit has two units, one to attach one to their current router and one that connects to other clients such as a gaming console or HD-TV to create a wireless connection.