Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > January > 08 > Entry
Convergence overload day
The Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing, and while I can’t be there, I can see from afar that the theme of the year seems to be, “Let’s take all those HDTVs, iPods and media-centric computers and find ways to let people move files around their house so they can view anything anywhere.”
This is fantastic, but it would have been great if there’s been some foresight and these wonderful innovations had been thought out before so many of us tried to wrestle with competing file formats, devices that don’t play nice with each other and the limitations of bandwidth.
Ah, the joys of early-adopting.
Still, true convergence is in the wings. Everyone from Microsoft to TV manufacturers, makers of wireless routers and content producers are going to get in the game to make your home wired together so you can view photos, videos and Web content wherever, whenever.
There will be dozens of useless set-top boxes that nobody will buy and so many ways to things to connect your iPod into that your music player will probably contract a venereal disease.
The challenge now: make these devices simple enough for anyone to operate, cheap enough for many families to afford ($500, including lots of hard-drive storage space and high-def capabilities would not be outrageous) and make sure that they play all formats, from protected iTunes music to movie-studio-flagged high-definition content, without a hitch.
Truth be told, I don’t have confidence that such a device will emerge this year. In the meantime, we’ll be left with piecemeal solutions and maybe one or two stand-out devices (Netgear, could this be what we’re hoping for?) that can do some of what digital homebodies of the future might need.
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