Finally – a DVD player that integrates into the Digital Hub
There’s a lot of buzz at the moment about which company is going to “own” your sitting room. The tech watchers (in the financial industries) are predicting that either Sony, Microsoft or (less likely) Apple will release a machine that bids to become your Home Server.
MS already has two threads of attack – the XBox 2 and Windows Media Centre Edition (which is basically a normal PC with a TV tuner in). Sony is thought to want to position the PS3 (or a more expensive variant of the PS3) as your home media server.
I’m not sure that people want a closed/proprietary converged system (that it’s illegal to modify) lurking in their sitting room – I think that they want the consumer electronics equivalent of Unix.
Unix is all about components – it’s built in small parts that interact with each other in open standards. That means that if you want to swap a part out and replace it with a better part (that performs a similar function) then you can.
Compare this with MS Windows and Sony’s PS2 – They fear loss of control, so they have closed, secret systems – e.g. Sony’s ATRAC audio codec and Windows’ symbiosis with the IE rendering engine. Sony might be coming round to open standards with their acceptance of MP3 in their Digital Audio products – mind you they’d be suicidal to continue ignoring MP3.
Here’s an example of a good component-like device: The Zensonic Z500:
It’s a DVD player that plays all the acronyms you can throw at it (MPEGs, DivX, etc…) and also has wired and wireless networking.
The networking becomes interesting when you see that they have server software (win/linux/mac os x) that streams media from your PC to the device.
Nice. And at about £170 – in March 2005.
