CES 2007 - Part II: IPTV on Xbox 360, iPhone and DTX

The Issue with All Approaches

Apple, Microsoft and Sony aren’t the only companies trying to do convergence right; at CES we saw companies from HP to Netgear and D-Link all with their own attempts at connecting your PC to your TV.  Unfortunately there’s no one device or set of devices that appears to do it all.

Part of the problem is that there is no clearly superior way to actually get content legally onto your PC.  With the exception of the iTunes Music Store, which has been immensely successful in the music market, buying content legally is basically offered through a fragmented set of movie and TV download services.  And with no clearly superior way of handling electronic distribution of content and DRM, much of the content stored on computers these days isn’t exactly legal.  Most manufacturers shy away from making it easy to play content in commonly pirated video formats, e.g. DivX, which ends up making many of these digital media extender devices useless. 

For years the PC industry was fighting for convergence, trying to get its side of the technology powerful and polished enough to actually support and drive consumer electronics devices in the home.  That part has happened, now it’s more an issue of who is going to do convergence right, and this question is far less dependent on simply getting more powerful hardware on your network. 

The issues surrounding approaches to DRM have made consistently headlines for the past couple of years in the technology world, but now the stakes are even higher.  All of the major players want to be the one to figure out the model that works the best so that they may capitalize on convergence.  Until one of them figures it out however, we’re bound to see many failed attempts at connecting the digital home, and many attempts that only bridge half the gap.