Home > Technobuddy > Archives > 2007 > March > 05
Monday, March 5, 2007
The coming revolution in your den
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The real advances in consumer electronics are going to take place in your den. Years ago Bill Gates and others talked about how the TV and the computer were going to be seamlessly wedded.
That’s slowly started to happen. But look for it to really pick up steam this year. Within a few years most of us will have a PC built into our home entertainment system.
There have been unsatisfactory - at least to me - attempts at this with Web TVs and other low rent computers made to work with your TV. But the big driver for the fast change I’m talking about will be the digital video recorder.
It’s already the best-loved gadget in my house. It records in full high definition and does so many things that VCRs (remember them?) and even fancy high def DVD players and recorders can’t do.
You know there is a big battle - I didn’t think it would go on this long - of formats for high definition DVDs. And that’s an important battleground since the HDTV is now becoming a relatively common appliance.
Since there is a format battle people are afraid to sink their money in a high def DVD player - who wants to be stuck with a stack of DVDs and a nice player that could become orphans?
Two things will happen, one is predictable, one may not be.
The battle will eventually be decided - that’s a safe bet.
But I think - maybe not so obviously - that the DVR, the digital video recorder, will eventually send both formats to the junk heap. Think about it - the stage is really set. These recorders use a computer hard disk - not a DVD - for storage. So what you record on them isn’t going to go out of date. You’ll be able to back up the movies you store onto your home computer network. And with hard disk storage space so cheap these days, the hard disk becomes the equivalent of an iPod. Your shelves don’t need to be cluttered with DVDs and finding and playing your movies from the hard disk is a breeze.
And it also sets things up for the next step - downloading videos from Apple or Amazon or - before long - a lot of different vendors. Once the trend toward using a hard disk for recordings becomes apparent, the next step will be full-blown home servers that allow better control of the TV, that couple online schedules with automated ways to operate the TV, and let you play your games on a TV.
All this stuff is possible now but I’m talking about a commonplace computerized appliance that becomes almost standard equipment for your home entertainment center.
When that happens, the sky is the limit - think of what you could do - wireless connections from that home server let you watch programs from any part of the house. Instead of desktop and laptop computers scattered around the house, you’d just need small wireless work stations that would use the computing power of that home network server.
It’s interesting to me how one small change could spark a major revolution in how home computing is done.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: HDTV
