In my book, Net Attitude, I asserted that the PC and the TV were not converging — in fact I said I believed that they are diverging. John McAllaster is reading the book and gave me some excellent feedback. With John’s permission I am posting his comments and also my reply to him. There is a lot more to say on the subject and I am working on it in a new book. I’ll be posting things here as that unfolds.
From John McAllaster
Subject of comment-> TV and PC Merging – True
I have been reading the book and find it very inspiring while being informative. However, I do disagree with your viewpoint that TV and PC won’t merge and that they have grown apart. ATI has created TV Tuner/capture cards and many other companies manufacture them as well. I have my DirecTV receiver and my Local Antenna plugged into my PC. Since my PC has a DVD player and a kick-butt sound system, I can be entertained in my bedroom as well as the conventional stuff in my living room. ATI even makes a card with a radio-signal remote that can change the TV channel from anywhere in the house… or volume, or song… whatever. You also forget the DVR capabilities of the computer. TIVO and Ultimate TV are really the embodiment of combining a computer and a TV. Storage is becoming important to television viewing and an operating system to search and set up! recording is crucial. Just as people with "always on" connections to the Internet with Broadband will never revert back to 56K modems, those who use DVRs will not go back to the old VCR. Even my DVR has built-in WebTV. The only drawback is that it uses a built-in modem instead of a connection to my Broadband. I can evenuse a wireless keyboard for easy surfing. The unit updates itself automatically. By the way, it is UltimateTV (a Microsoft product). I hope the trend continues in merging the technologies.
Great book!
Sincerely,
John McAllaster
Clovis, CA
My reply to John
Hello John. We probably don’t differ much in our opinions on this. You definitely can watch TV on a PC and you can do your email and surf on your TV. My point is that TV is going upscale with big reductions in projector cost and HDTV and that the home theater is now within reach for many more people. If you have a theater you probably are not going to use it to surf or do email. On the other hand if you have a theater you probably are not going to watch a DVD on your PC, even though you can. I just built a house and have wired it to accommodate a lot of different things. All aspects, including AM, FM, XM, MP3, HDTV, etc. are centrally controlled by an AMX NetLinx computer. So far it is working out really well. I am working on a new book and plan to get into all this stuff in a lot more depth. I appreciate your comments and would like to include them in a posting in my weblog.
