LAS VEGAS – After a decade of talk, technology companies are finally beginning to deliver on their promise to give people living-room access to every form of electronic entertainment – television, movies, music, video games and the Internet – with the click of a remote.
But at demonstration after demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it was obvious that the “digital hub” for the home still faces a couple of major problems.
“Consumers don’t want to be network administrators just to get access to their media. It’s still not easy enough, and still too expensive,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group. “The industry is about 60 percent there.”
Some of the hubs are personal computers for the living room that record TV programs, offer movies on demand, play recorded music or allow Web browsing. Others are TV boxes or portable music players that offer similar functions. In some cases, the entertainment isn’t consolidated in a single box, but spread across a wireless network of boxes.
There’s no question that people are accumulating bigger and bigger collections of songs, movies, photos, TV shows and games.
The tech companies are betting that mainstream consumers, not just technophiles, want and need more sophisticated devices to automatically manage those collections for them.
Even as many early devices are still selling poorly, the companies hold out hope that the demand will materialize when they hit the right balance of features.
“It’s not going to be something just for the super-rich,” added Dan Vivoli, executive vice president at Santa Clara, Calif., chip maker Nvidia, which makes graphics chips used in a variety of hubs.
Many of these entertainment hubs are still too expensive, such as the $1,000-plus Media Center PCs sold by many companies. But they’re getting cheaper, simpler, more versatile, and better connected. They still suffer from ease-of-use problems, incompatibilities and a lack of cheap services, said Tim Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates proudly noted that more than 1.4 million Media Center PCs, equipped with Microsoft software and aimed at living-room use, have been sold since 2002. But that’s a tiny slice of overall PC sales.
“This has been a great year moving to the digital lifestyle,” Gates said in his keynote speech. “The PC has a central role to play where it all comes together.”
But the PC still gets blasted by rivals, such as Samsung Senior Vice President Peter Weedfald, as too complicated to use. “It’s just going to sit in a corner somewhere,” he said. “We think the cell phone is the true digital convergence device.”
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