I'm a bit behind the times – in terms of commenting on Viiv, Intel's platform for digital entertainment, and actually having any sort of digital media hub in my living room. I've got my TV (not wide-screen and only 4.0 surround), a cable box, an old VCR and a DVD player. Together they keep me pretty entertained. I'm not really happy though as I've got power cables and connector leads running riot, making my living room a health and safety hazard. All those components barely fit into the TV cabinet, which was designed to house a VCR and some videos. More than that is the gigabytes of digital media that is sitting in my PC in the bedroom. I can't access them from the living room downstairs.
I immediately dismissed moving the PC downstairs, as it's a really ugly beige box, I've run out of extension power sockets, there are enough cables already and I really don't have anywhere to put it that will allow me to actually sit at it and use actively. Oh, and I almost forgot, the fan is really noisy.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas at the beginning of the year, Intel told the world that digital media would never be the same again. As expected most observers were sceptical. (Read this article in the Washington Post and the related comments in Digg). What is Viiv? It's not anything tangible in itself. It relies on Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) as the brains – the operating system. Wikipedia says:
Viiv (pron. IPA /'vaiv/ rhymes with five) is a platform marketing initiative from Intel. Like Intel's Centrino and vPro, Viiv is a computer platform certification for a particular combination of Intel products as its primary components. It is an open specification for an Intel-based Media Center PC.
A BBC news article described it as:
A set of standards to help bring on-demand, high definition video from the internet (preferably Intel's portal) into all parts of the home, wirelessly.
The critics attacked it as marketing hype and that there was nothing new here. True. There are lots of products out there that you could cobble together to give you the same end-result. Loads of people refer to MythTV, an open source Personal Video Recorder (PVR), which is like a TiVo. That's not quite the same thing as an MCE system, although for many people a PVR is plenty. Apple, of course, has Front Row which can connect to other Apple devices via Bonjour.
I've thought of setting up my PC as a media server, using something like the SageTV Media Extender. But in the end, I was far too lazy as I would have had to learn how to do it; I was worried that after buying the kit it wouldn't work and would have wasted all that money; it would probably have been an eye sore; and because all the kit was of varying ages I knew the set-up wouldn't be optimal and that would have nagged at me.
This is why Viiv and its story stand a chance in spite of the negative coverage. Geeks might complain about digital rights management (DRM), proprietary technology, and over-specification to sell more Intel products. I even read someone say that Viiv is just a 'horsepower sticker'. But average consumers just want something that works. Viiv is trying to offer that. If it is to succeed in the majority of living rooms, the box shouldn't be like a Swiss knife that has loads of features that you never use. It needs to behave like good consumer-friendly electronics – simple, dedicated to doing core tasks well, ergonomic, good looking. Hopefully, with Intel's prompting, manufacturers will produce an array of form factors from traditional towers to sleek DVD-like boxes so consumers can choose the hardware combination that best suits their needs.
Furthermore, to complete the digital media lifestyle story, Intel has signed up entertainment providers. It's not just about the hardware; it's as much about the content. Like I mentioned in another blog post (Loyalty through the brand), Apple's iPods are successful not only because of the nice product design, but because all parts of the story link up – the end-to-end experience. There is the music management software, iTunes, and the content provider, iTunes Music Store.
So, convergence is not all about getting rid of components and making one integrated box. It's not about moving the computer into the living room. Convergence will end up meaning moving more and more content to a digital media hub (i.e. the PC), especially as bandwidth and content providers increases, and downloading becomes the norm for accessing content.
There will be a multitude of hardware combinations based on a flexible nerve centre, the digital media hub. I look forward to a MCE PC in the study, where I can surf the web and type up a document (at the 2-foot interface), while the other members of my family can listen to the mp3 collection via a wireless music adapter in the garden and, at the same time, select, download and enjoy a rented movie from CinemaNow in the living room.