We asked two Circuit City experts, Forums Manager Doug Hess and eBusiness Manager Matthew West, what they see ahead for home entertainment.
The future is now
Until recently, Hess says, consumers waited to be told what was next for their living rooms. VCR? Check. Surround sound? Okay. Today customer demand determines what’s offered. “People are now saying, ‘I wonder how I can do that?’” Hess says. “And they never asked that before.”
The big “I wonder” is “How do I transfer music, movies and photos from my computer to my TV?” Several solutions exist:
USB network adapter A USB network adapter plugs into your TiVo or other form of digital video recorder (DVR) and enables it to access content from your computer—wirelessly.
MediaSmartThe HP MediaSmart receiver, introduced at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), and the Netgear EVA8000 automatically fetch movies, music and photos from your computer—wirelessly. See how these work here.
SlingboxSlingbox lets you access the stored TV shows on your DVR or computer from any other computer—from the PC at Grandma’s house or your laptop in Tokyo.
Your living room in 2010—unplugged
“The days of ‘Oh, “Lost” is on at 8 o’clock’ are over,” Hess says. “People are going to watch what they want to watch, when they want to watch.” This newfound freedom will spring from a seamless interface between TVs and computers, he says, and wired connections will be as quaint as incandescent bulbs. Instead, components will beam uncompressed video and audio across the room.
TVs themselves could look quite different in 2010. They may be small and flexible enough to roll up and take with you. Or they may be enormous screens that are integrated into your home—like Panasonic’s LifeWall, a giant high-definition projector system that alters the images it shows—landscapes, videos, virtual windows—depending on who’s watching.
You may still need a subscription à la cable, West says, but programming will be Internet-based and “very niche-oriented.” People will subscribe only to shows that suit their interests, whether ice skating or interior design, cage fighting or sci-fi.
The crystal ball says…
Looking even further into the future, the idea of convergence—the relationship between computers and television—is moot by 2020, West says. “Everything has an IP address. Everything works together.” Your refrigerator might tell the grocery store when you’re running low on milk. Your dog’s collar could alert you when Rover roves too far.
Twelve years from now, the majority of the content we enjoy on our TVs (if we still call it TV) will come not from subscription services or tangible media like discs, but “from the cloud somewhere,” West says. By cloud he means the vast array of servers that will contain pretty much everything—every song, every movie, every book and sitcom and cooking show. The idea of owning media on disc or paper may be completely obsolete.
Ten or twenty years from now, Hess says, almost any form of entertainment customers demand could be technologically feasible, including 3D TV. It’s already here—any TV with a 120Hz frame rate is capable of displaying video that’s three-dimensional when viewed with special glasses. And at CES, Philips showed off an LCD TV on which 3D images appeared to pop right out of the screen without the need for glasses. “It was stunning,” Hess says. As for me, I’m patiently waiting for the day a school of tropical fish swims out of my TV and around my living room.
—Melissa Barber
