Consumer Electronics Show goes wireless

Last weekend was the Consumer Electronics Show 2003, the annual
show where companies reveal their plans for the year as well as
some of the strangest prototypes imaginable. For instance, Phillips
showed off a $1,700 remote control that allows Internet and e-mail
access via its 6-inch screen and a wireless connection.

In fact, networking, and especially wireless networking, emerged
as the largest trend for 2003’s show. In the next year,
everything from our televisions to our car stereos will be able to
be connected to a household network. This is happening as the line
between what information comes into our family room and what flows
into our computer room blurs.

The most promising application of wireless technology will be
devices that allow digital media, especially music and pictures to
be beamed (via Wi-Fi a.k.a. 802.11b ““ a standard in wireless
transmission) to our family room. Companies such as Cd30, Rockford
Fosgate, Hewlett Packard and Motorola all unveiled little
networking boxes which connect to your home stereo and broadcast
music from your PC to somewhere else in the house. There will also
be boxes that connect directly to the Internet and stream music
through pay services such as Phillips’
Streamium.   

Some other devices take the notion of streaming music into the
family room one step further by adding pictures, video and Internet
content to the list of capabilities. Sony, Pioneer and HP all
unveiled products that link digital media from the PC to the family
room with varying degrees of feature content and ease of
operation.

After a few years on the market, TiVo has finally achieved a
good deal of sales and has won some important battles in its legal
struggle with the entertainment industry. To enhance the current
line of digital video recorders, TiVo will be adding boxes that
support HDTV, DirecTV reception, and most interestingly, wired and
wireless networking options.

Dubbed the “Home Media Option,” it will allow
various TiVo units in a house to share content with each other, as
well as music, pictures and programming guides to be retrieved from
your computer. The upgrade costs $99 plus the price of networking
hardware, but it was the most exciting new product at CES.
Apparently, the interface is very sleek and the thought of having
high definition DirecTV reception and wireless connectivity with my
PC makes my butt tingle with anticipation to sit down on the couch
and never get up.

Trying, possibly, to one-up TiVo, Hy-Tek created a $6,000 LCD TV
that has a computer built in. The 30-inch LCD TV is only 5 inches
thick and uses a 2.5 GHz Pentium 4 processor and hard drive to
allow digital video recording on the fly. The television can
display video from any source and has a built-in DVD player.

Sonicblue, the maker of TiVo’s competitor ReplayTV has
also gone the way of the network with its new GoVideo DVD player
that can stream audio and video off of your PC. Best of all is the
DVD player costs only $250 and includes the networking
hardware.

Looking toward the future, major electronics manufacturers Sony
and Matsushita (i.e. Panasonic) have joined together to develop a
Linux-based operating system to serve as the backbone for numerous
new networked products. The products are all designed to bring more
content to our fingertips and make the process of watching
television much more interactive. Instead of merely receiving
content, Sony and others see the computer as a kind of slave that
will allow us to acquire, sort, and edit content before beaming it
over to our TVs.

I say, beam me up Sony! Take me into that great wireless unknown
we call the future.

Robert’s got the flu right now. If you want to e-mail him
some chicken soup for the techie soul try
[email protected].