James Delahunty
6 Jan 2007 5:08
In the past few years we have seen Apple bring a digital music player to the market, the iPod, which has so far completely held off competition. We've seen mobile music phones emerge but fail to have the same impact thus far. We've also seen video capabilities added to portable devices and the next generation of consoles putting an emphasis on high definition video content.
However, right now, some of the world's largest electronics giants are going to clash over which one can dominate the world's living rooms with their equipment. With services such as iTunes offering TV show and movie downloads, there is a reason to close the gap between PCs and the other consumer electronics equipment in your home.
Apple will soon launch it's "iTV" device which can use a wireless network to stream video content from the iTunes software straight to your television. The iPod maker's arch enemy, Microsoft, is also expected to outline its home media server, code-named "Quattro," at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) next week.
The Xbox 360 console has media extension features built in, but to get the most out of it you need to have Microsoft's Windows Media Center OS installed somewhere in your home and with the operating system's struggle over the past few years, that does limit what the average consumer can get from it.
Other brand name manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard, Philips Electronics and Sony all have plans to unveil similar equipment this year also. All will face each other this year despite the lack of noticeable consumer demand for the equipment. "It's a market that has been slow to take off," says NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin. He estimated that only a few thousand of these devices are sold each month.
Of course, there are other problems that consumers face, like the limited number of homes that do already use wireless networks. For those that do use wireless networks, these devices have not been that easy to get up and running flawlessly either. Never-the-less, for those of us that are interested in sharing our multimedia throughout the home between PC and CE equipment, let the competition commence.
For quite a lot of multimedia enthusiasts, it will be hard for the electronics giants to match the usability and sheer brilliance of software like Xbox Media Center (XBMC).
Source:
Reuters