ANALYSIS
Simplicity can enhance consumer tech
New technologies are making consumer electronic devices more intriguing, yet more complex. Perhaps the next great technological feat would be a little simplicity.
By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post
LAS VEGAS — After a few days at the Consumer Electronics Show, it's hard to remember when watching TV involved just one box in the living room.
Now, the TV, in a sort of cybernetic fission, has fractured itself into as many as seven different components: the screen, the HDTV (high-definition television) tuner, the cable or satellite receiver, the surround-sound receiver, the TiVo or ReplayTV personal video recorder, the VCR, and the DVD player.
Oh, and five speakers and a subwoofer.
Each box besides the speakers, you can safely assume, comes with its own remote control, a power cord angling for the last open spot on the surge protector, and a tangled array of audio and video wires in the back.
That is not a sustainable scenario for either consumers or the manufacturers who will take their tech-support calls — and yet the show floor here abounds with schemes to add still more functions, options and boxes to everybody's audio-video stack. One popular addition: some kind of digital-media jukebox that duplicates a computer's functions, at $1,000 or more.
Is there an alternative to this cable-strangled future? I am cautiously optimistic that there is, after spending time recently up close with the computer and consumer-electronics industries at CES and, earlier, at Macworld Expo in San Francisco.
The MacWorld Expo started with Steve Jobs' Macworld keynote speech, when the CEO unveiled a round of updates to Apple's four core multimedia programs — iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD — that make them more effective for dealing with digital content and help them work together. In doing so, he made an excellent case for the computer's primacy in creating and managing pictures, music and movies. (The next day, Microsoft echoed this point by launching its own updated series of digital-media applications.)
Second, Jobs announced an update to Apple's AirPort wireless networking that is fast enough to send high-quality video throughout a home. Of two possible successors to the WiFi standard used in AirPort, Apple wisely chose the one ("IEEE 802.11g" in the vernacular) that works with existing WiFi access points. This timely vote by Apple, which popularized WiFi with the original AirPort in 1999, should help end the wireless standards battle quicker than otherwise possible.
With those announcements, Apple has provided the clearest version yet of a plan for a simpler audio-video experience: Let the computer and TV remain separate, in separate rooms, but use wireless technology to make the computer's resources — MP3s, digital photos, video recordings, whatever — available in the living room. That same wireless technology can be used for TV-to-TV sharing of content. Electronics manufacturers can quit trying to mimic a computer's audio-video tools and concentrate on something every consumer cares about: consolidating boxes in the living room.
At CES, several manufacturers showed how that might work. TiVo demonstrated a home-network option for its digital video recorders, which puts a PC or Mac's music and photo collection on the TV with a few taps of the remote.
Sony's RoomLink, Sonicblue's Go-Video D2730 DVD player and Hewlett-Packard's Digital Media Receiver offer similar capabilities, although with some limits (for instance, Sony's device can only access content on newer Sony Vaio computers). Sony, Philips Electronics and Thomson also showed off simpler but cheaper wireless hardware that focuses on making MP3 collections and Web radio available in the living room.
None of these boxes requires that you add a hard drive to your stereo or run Ethernet cable through the living room. That's how this kind of thing will have to work.
At the TV end of this computer-audio-video chain, unfortunately, the electronics industry is still trying to answer a basic question: What goes where? While the Federal Communications Commission has mandated that all digital TVs must eventually include over-the-air tuners, and manufacturers have reached a long-awaited agreement to embed digital-cable tuners in digital sets, few companies expect to include either sort of tuner until sometime next year. (Your ability to get a clear HDTV signal over the air and record what you want without being locked down by "digital rights management" technology also remains iffy.)
That leaves a lot of room for confusion when consumers attempt to cobble together an HDTV system. If you have to get a separate digital-cable or satellite receiver, what other functions do you want integrated into it — DVD playback, TiVo-style digital video recording, DVD recording or something else?
HDTV remains the biggest topic at the show — it's hard to miss the wall-size sets, many of them flat-panel plasma displays. This year has brought a new kind of HDTV to the floor, "digital light processing" (DLP), or "liquid crystal on silicon" (LCOS) sets. These not-quite-flat TVs use a small internal digital display and a set of mirrors to provide a projection-screen-size picture in a much thinner footprint, only 18 inches deep in some cases. They're also less expensive than the plasma competition, but not by that much — a 43-incher from Samsung will sell for $3,700, for instance.
It all leaves me with the same feeling I've had at every other CES I've attended since 1998: Maybe this will be a little simpler next year.
