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
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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
15 Comments
View All Comments
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.