Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2005 > November > 30 > Entry
All the way Viiv?
Intel’s announcement of partners for its new PC entertainment platform (wait, isn’t this about five years too late?) called “Viiv” (pronounced to rhyme with “live,” “jive” and “hive,” since it’s running on a Windows-based platform) will apparently do for home entertainment/PC interoperability what the Centrino chip did for Wi-Fi.
Wait, didn’t you hear? Intel is taking credit for the wireless revolution! Says Kevin Corbett, an Intel vice president in charge of content services, “We basically accelerated the heck out of Wi-Fi (with Centrino). We plan to do the same thing around digital entertainment.”
Huh. And here I thought cheap routers, Internet cafes, Starbucks and non-profit free wireless groups accelerated that growth.
In any case, Intel’s plan sounds an awful lot like what Microsoft is trying to turn its Xbox360 console into. (It didn’t quite work out that way for the original Xbox, but that console wasn’t built for High-Definition and video streaming.)
This AP article emphasizes the relationship Intel has formed with struggling TiVo Inc., but what’s promised doesn’t sound very different from TiVo’s own “TiVo-To-Go” technology or its recent announcements about making TiVo programs available to iPods and Sony PSPs.
Journalists love including anything TiVo-related in stories because it’s one of the few continually evolving technologies that readers seem to really grasp. Yeah, this Intel thing is pretty boring and complex, but check it out… it’ll have TiVo! TiVo, people! You can spend another few hundred or thousand dollars to watch “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives” in whole new ways! It’s a great day for technology!
Permalink | | Categories: Computers, TV
