I've been testing for a while now several of the entries into the home server market by Microsoft and several others. Prior to these servers I used a mesh-network of my electronics to distribute and access my digital content on all my displays.
Recently though I added several connected photo frames that can accept "streamed" content that really pushed me to now have all my media content in one location. This led me to move all my media that I want connected like photos, video, music etc onto these servers as the digital backbone or "nucleus" as I like to call it.
I am a strong believer in keeping your data network seperate from your media network. In short that means that I would have one network, say 802.11x to let all my machines get to the internet for data. Then a seperate more proprietary network that connects my entertainment devices to things like my digital nucleus/server or each other. This way the experience of video not skipping or music getting lost, pictures not being delivered in full quality will not happen. Their is a higher level of quality assurance in this model where the media network and the data network is seperate.
The result now is all the video I create, photos I take and music I acquire are all now automatically synced with my storage server and readily available to access at any time by my TV's, PC's and connected photo frames.
Thus far the experience has been quite positive and my assumptions of the importance of a digital nucleus for the family or individual has been confirmed. Wheter that nucleus is online, mesh network of devices or a dedicated server is yet to be flushed out. However the option that it is all three is highly likely.