Another mouse in the house

Another mouse in the house

Jan 19th 2007
From Economist.com

The computer industry targets the living room

LAST week’s headlines were grabbed by Apple’s gorgeous iPhone; a nifty high-definition video disc from Warner: and a high-definition video-disc player from LG Electronics that can cope with two rival formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray. But at the big trade shows where these were unveiled—the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and Macworld in San Francisco—the big preoccupation was the computer industry’s quest to take over the living room.

The computer makers have already persuaded us to buy one box for the study and a laptop for the road. Now they want to get a third machine into the household: a “home server”, or entertainment hub.

This latest push began a couple of years back with “media centre” computers, pricey PCs decked out like set-top boxes that hooked up to a TV. Beneath the hood was a souped-up version of Windows XP called Media Centre Edition. You could operate the computer with a remote control, and view the display from ten feet instead of two—for conventional television, video and photographs from disc, or anything streamed from the web. A whole new market was thought to exist here, where the lean-back mode of living-room leisure met the forward crouch of the workspace. Nice try, but no banana.

Now the offer is getting better. In the past month firms such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Advanced Micro Devices, NetGear and SanDisk have launched all sorts of gadgetry for showing computer content on television screens. They are exploiting three things that weren’t around before. One is the rapid penetration of high-definition television with flat screens measuring 40 inches or more. Another is the proliferation of home-based wireless networks operating at Ethernet speeds. A third is the humungous size of the hard-drives in new PCs.

Sling Media has been testing the possibilities. It scored a hit a couple of years ago with its Slingbox, which could redirect your home television signal via internet to a computer anywhere in the world. Last week it unveiled a device called Sling Catcher that does the opposite—beaming video content from a computer (think YouTube or webcasts) to the big screen in the living room. True believers see the internet as a big DVR in the clouds, and the PC as the remote control.

They call this a smart TV?

The bandwagon looks unstoppable now that Microsoft has jumped fully on board. Windows Vista, the latest iteration of Microsoft’s operating system, has all the features of Media Centre Edition bundled into its high-end versions. It also has a powerful set of multimedia tools called DirectX 10, which speeds up 3D graphics processing dramatically for video and games. These features alone let a lowly PC double as a high-definition television. And Microsoft has struck a deal with Fox Sports to offer interactive high-definition programming for a new generation of Media Centre PCs that will be in the stores this spring.

The battle for the living room has further to go. The last thing anybody wants is a television beset, as their computer often is, with bugs, spyware, viruses and Trojan horses. Vista may prove more secure than its predecessors, but even then, why would anyone want a machine with the firepower to manage a business, simply to run a telly?

Television makers are going to fight back, borrowing from computers to make their sets smarter. Already they have twigged that hard drives make better storage than magnetic tapes or optical discs. As more improvements follow, smart TVs will need an operating system to manage their internal chores, but this is more likely to be a stripped-down and embedded version of Linux than an overly complicated solution such as Vista.

So whatever you end up calling the machine in your living room a couple of years from now, it is likely to be the product of a collision between a smart TV and a super-wide PC. And probably you won’t mind which it most resembles―so long as the picture doesn’t also crash.