|
Tuesday, August 08, 2006The living room PC?This Slate article piles on computer makers about their multimedia efforts to give us a PC in the living room for entertainment. The author wonders why people haven't bit and posits that people want to keep their 2 ft and 10 ft gadgets straight - they look at computers up close and televisions from far away and that's that. I'm not so sure that's the case. Rather, the problem is one of mindset. Between life in grad school and life in high rent, postage-stamp size apartment California, I've known a fair number of people to watch DVDs on their PCs while the television simply ceased to be as important as it once was - if you're surfing the net, with its millions of offerings, who needs 300 pre-programmed channels? What the television is good for is not watching what you want to watch, but watching what's on because you've nothing better to do. With this in mind, an entertainment PC would have to be a pretty passive thing. If it gives you too many choices, your thought isn't going to be, "What's on?" but "Why am I messing with this?" In other words, an entertainment PC needs two sets of controls, one for the two-foot window, one for the ten-foot window. But the ten-foot controls should have little more functionality than a standard remote - it should offer control over the things a PC can do fast and if you have to go to the desktop to do things more complicated, such is life. In this way, it would be possible to blur the entertainment PC into things more easily. The author is correct that aspects of this hybridization don't make sense, however. The living room PC could only find a home in a house with multiple PCs. You can't pass up writing your proposal because the missus wants to watch Desperate Housewives, or whatever rubbish they're peddling these days. Nor can she pass up writing her proposal while you watch Sports Center. The living room PC, I think, is already here in that a generation of college students has now hovered around the computer to see something goofy on the net, watch a DVD and so on. But the way we use these devices and the expectations we have for them are going to shift. People who sit and watch jerky video because the cablemodem's not running quite right but they like the content aren't necessarily going to need picture perfect big screen televisions. What do we really need? If you look through the snazzier catalogs, they're starting to offer video glasses - headphones and little screens. The real killer for the living room PC is going to be a killer for big screen televisions too - we all watch our own stuff now and appointment television is a thing of the past - at least for the whole family. The kids have their appointments, maybe, and mom and dad theirs, but our last must-see tv, as far as I know, was Sex in the City, not something you'd bring the six and seven year-olds in to share with. Our real living room pc-tv is going to be two laptops and two wireless audio-video sets so that dad can watch football and mom can watch H&G while the kids watch Barney on the old tv. Ah, family time! 
posted by gbarto at 10:57 AM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
