CES 2007 - Part II: IPTV on Xbox 360, iPhone and DTX
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on January 16, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Final Words
As a show, this year's CES was relatively disappointing. We spent far more time walking around the show than actually seeing new product and honestly, one of the most interesting announcements wasn't even at the show but rather at Macworld in San Francisco. However disappointing the show was, it served as an example of the upcoming struggles in this new world of PC and CE technology convergence.
As we've already mentioned, convergence is no longer about if or when, but how and who. The culmination of decades of evolving PC and CE technology has left us with an industry that has the ability to do much, but remains largely untapped. In many ways, AMD's DTX announcement highlights a major necessity for the next-generation of convergence products to succeed: standards.
The entire PC industry was built around standards and companies doing their best to achieve greatness within the confines of those standards. For us to truly have useful convergence products we need the same sort of consumer influenced standards; with everything from DRM to cellphone platforms, unity and interoperability are necessary to build useful products in the convergence space.
With its Vista, Xbox 360 and IPTV strategy, Microsoft appears to have its mind (and products) in the right place. In one fell swoop Microsoft broke into the living room, a part of the digital household that everyone had talked about entering but few actually had.
As competitive as Apple has become in the past couple of years, it's tough to compete with Microsoft's strategy when it comes to infiltrating the digital home. However with the success of the iPod and initially looking at the iPhone, it appears that Apple's greatest chance for success in the current convergence market is when you're outside of your digital home. At first glance, the iPhone appears to be what we've wanted from PDAs and later from smartphones for years now. As always, we'll have to reserve judgment until we've got a unit in hand but the demos look impressive.
One thing is for sure; the market is changing, and the coming years will be filled with many frustratingly poor attempts at intelligent devices. If the PC industry's evolution is any indication, the result of a bit of suffering will be a much more fun world for technology enthusiasts.
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Rock Hydra - Wednesday, January 17, 2007 - link
I hope not.
archcommus - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
The article speaks largely about waiting for a company to do convergence perfectly, to combine the PC and TV seamlessly and easily. Am I missing something here or can I do this all on my own very easily? I don't own my own home, but if I did, I would have a server PC with all of my content, PCs in each room, a PC powering each TV (or monitor, same difference really), with gigabit ethernet connecting it all. Each PC powering a TV would of course have a tuner card installed and PVR software like SageTV. Bingo - every TV in my house can now watch live TV, function as a PVR/TiVo-like device, and also view content stored on any PC in my home since they're all on one LAN. I can also play my music, view my photos, and even browse the internet if I wanted at any TV in the house.There. Did I just solve the problem? :P I'm kidding of course, I just don't get what I'm missing here.
Wellsoul2 - Thursday, January 18, 2007 - link
IPTV-But you've got to pay..same old same old.Right now my cable is connected to my computer and I get over the air HDTV.
My computer does DVR..all this with a cheap tuner card.
Seems pretty lame to use an XBOX when you have a PC that can adjust the
picture etc and play videos from Yahoo already.
My TV is my second monitor already.
Itunes downloaded stuff is ok for tv shows..movies are pricy.
Araemo - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
"The real question is whether or not AMD will be able to put enough resources behind DTX to make it a widely accepted industry standard."You know, they really might not have to. Why? Same reason ATX actually caught on: Cases can be built VERY EASILY to support both DTX and ATX, or Mini-ITX and DTX.. allowing case manufacturers to hop on board for almost no cost.
Motherboard manufacturers don't even have to wait for the cases to be available, since the DTX boards will fit on ATX cases... So I'd expect, if AMD doesn't piss anyone off, and makes nice with ASUS and the other tier-1 mobo manufacturers... smaller DTX boards might replace mini-ATX if they have any significant improvements. (What I'm trying to say is: What is the risk if ASUS makes their tiny board with only one PCI slot DTX or mini-ATX? There should be none, if the board was already designed to be that cheap and restricted for low costs... The board will still work in ATX cases so they can advertise it as dual compatibility.)
RogueSpear - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
I DVR just about everything that I watch. With the amount of money I throw at Time Warner I feel justified in blowing past all of the commercials, plus I like to watch things when it's convenient to me. So can I keep on playing a game at full speed (or for that matter at all) while this thing is recording one or two HD streams? Or do I need to put the controller down because it's time to record The Office?glennpratt - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
Divx != Pirated; and vise versa Anand. I get the point, but that mentality doesn't help.If only it were easy to encode every movie and TV show I own or have recorded to a decent format and have everybody play it. But no! Movie companies want to throw a wrench in the works and software developers want to divide up the broken works into sovereign territories.
PrinceGaz - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
In fact these days most pirated content is encoded with XviD rather than DivX. Admittedly there isn't really much difference between them as they are both implementations of MPEG4 ASP, and on a computer you can play back DivX encoded files using the XviD decoder and vice-versa.mino - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
Well, for the most part, I do NOT play the movies I bought! I just encode the to some high-quality XviD, put on home NAS and then play whenever I want (without all of the commercials and other things I paid for while not eanting them).AFAIK most friend do it this way so I really see no reason for going DRM...
However that DTX thingie seems sweet. Especially combined with Fusion...
Goty - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
If you look at the placement of the northbridge relative to the memory slots (find pictures elsewhere on the web for a full shot of the board), the CPU socket sits right between the two. What does this mean? This means that there's pretty much no way that this form factor will work with any CPU that doesn't utilize and onboard memory controller, i.e. this pretty much leaves Intel out of it.Araemo - Tuesday, January 16, 2007 - link
Besides the fact that you can probably relocate both mobo and northbridge if your northbridge is your memory controller - Intel is moving to an on-die memory controller too, so that is fairly forward-thinking.