[LINK] Consumer Electronics Show - wireless DVD player that c onnects to Internet direct

[Chirgwin, Richard]

All,

In the midst of all the land-grabbing, I wonder how many of these products
will end up in the "dead duck" basket alongside quadrophonic stereos, laser
videodisk and the Internet refrigerator?

[Swapping threads from Brenda's reading, note for example that what
Panasonic showed off is a pre-standard powerline comms product!]

At the moment, what I mainly see in these "PC-home entertainment
convergence" products is that you can turn the PC (or a PC-like device) into
a filer, and build a network (which probably needs care and feeding, all
networks do!) to send music or video from the filer to the playback. Then
the playback comes from the "PC" in the form of audio/video output cables
(sub-optimal), or it gets streamed to the network so that a playback decoder
can handle it (another expensive box).

So you either still need to run A/V cables around a home if you have more
than one (say) TV; or each location becomes more expensive.

And all of this is, mostly, only "catching up" - a lot of money gets spent
to build a new infrastructure which doesn't really add "new function", but
rather digitises the old functions. Hard drive record/playback/route is
'cool' but is it worth the cost to the target market? (The target being the
mass market; at least for TV and audio we don't have to flog the dead horse
about whether the mass market needs to study TV to be a worthy participant!)

Apart from the financial cost, it's worth remembering that most consumer
electronics companies also have a DRM agenda. Beware the cargo cult...

RC

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Saliya Wimalaratne [mailto:saliya at hinet.net.au] 
> Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2004 3:24 PM
> To: Brenda Aynsley
> Cc: Link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] Consumer Electronics Show - wireless DVD 
> player that connects to Internet direct
> 
> 
> On Sun, 11 Jan 2004, Brenda Aynsley wrote:
> 
> > Linksys goes Hollywood with wireless DVD player
> <snip>
> > http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php?id=1029923824&eid=-108
> 
> That's funny: I have a Linux box at home, that does this, right now. 
> And it's been doing it for *at least* 8 months; using 802.11b 
> and ethernet,
> VideoLAN; and TV/audio out. 
> 
> Wonder whether that's what the linksys box does ? :) 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Saliya
> 
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