Viiv 1.5 May End Traditional Media PCs

An anonymous reader writes "CNET.com.au makes an interesting case for why the next revision of Viiv will kill off living room PCs as we know them. Instead, we'll be streaming content to digital media adapters from a PC in our home office. From the article: 'The existence of digital media adapters will totally remove the need to have a media centre PC taking up space in your living room, unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.'"

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[KiloByte]

From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

"Viiv is a platform marketing initiative from Intel "...
(bolding mine)

Nothing else needs to be added...

Done.

[Anonymous Coward]

MythTV box in the basement with terrabytes of storage. Mac Mini on top of the TV acting as a client to the MythTV box with an IR receiver for remote control.

Of course there is still one major sticking point. Price! MythTV box plus Mac Mini = $Thousands versus DVR rental from your cable company $10/mnth. Sure the rented DVR will cost more in the long run but, people won't see that. All they'll see is $2,500 starting cost, forget MythTV.

Nonsense

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Not everyone has a 'home office'

The future of the home media center is the mac mini (perhaps with viiv chips in future)

A simple to setup, simple to use feature filled vertically integrated experience is what people want - and Apple is the company to deliver!

Don't be stupid

[BadAnalogyGuy]

You're going to end up with a DVR device that can record video, play DVDs, play VHS tapes, and play music CDs. You're not going to download torrents of movies from the web and then play them back from your PC.

You're going to be like everyone else and rent or buy DVDs and live with the warnings and advertisements in them. Viiv isn't going to change anything.

More Marketing, Less Innovation

[MLopat]

Just like the Media Center PC's from Microsoft, that have gained "less than favourable traction" since their release, Intel's brand of Viv marketing to bring digital content to the living room is lacking the user friendly features that the average consumer is looking for.

The idea of building a server to house your media collection is fascinating to the nerds out there, but for the average movie fanatic, the thought of mixing the right hardware and software on a file server that resides else where in the house is not appealing. Further, like any other home computer, this server will require maintenance. The last thing most consumers want when they come home after sitting in front of their office computer for 10 hours is to have to retreat to the home office, patch their server, download their favorite shows, etc. etc. just so they can finally veg out.

No kidding. It's about divergence.

[91degrees]

The computer industry seems to have this idea that we want to combine all our gadgetry into a single box. There's always bee this assumption. The fact is, people prefer separate dedicated equipment.

Just because somethign can be used for several purposes doesn't mean people want it to. They have a dedicated TV for a games console, and generally don't even use a DVD player as a CD player. If a device has a single dedicated purpose, it becomes a lot easier to use, and usualy does the job its designed to do a lot better.

Re:Done.

[dpilot]

Isn't it good to know that Intel is about to validate what we've been doing for some time, now. I felt so terribly exposed with my MythTV backend up in the study, streaming video to MythFrontends elsewhere in the house, until it became "Strategic." Of course I'm sure MythTV isn't "strategic" to Viiv.

As for cost, there's a PC up in the study, anyway. It's just a bit more powerful, has a bigger hard drive, and has a capture card to make it a MythTV backend. Yes, there's cost. But it's not a whole PC's worth of cost, just the additional stuff.

Re:You're right, it's a small box

[ozmanjusri]

Imagine your entire CD/DVD collection available at the touch of a remote.

Imagine it? I can already remember it...

Re:Not The Big Box

[MrFlibbs]

You're missing the point. The idea is to use the PC to manage all your digital content but to control it remotely. Nobody is talking about the user having to walk into another room to queue things up. In fact, the whole point is *NOT* to do this. Instead, the user will use a handheld remote control device that wirelessly accesses content on your PC (where ever it may be) and streams the content to your home theater system. The goal is to let you do this from your couch.

As TFA points out, all of the existing solutions have drawbacks (too bulky, too loud, too inconvenient). A more elegant solution is to harness the power and disk space of your PC to store and manage your digital media but wirelessly feed them into your theater system with a simple interface. That's what the new VIIV products claim to do. How well they do so remains to be seen, but if they can pull this off it could be a great product.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:You're right, it's a small box

[Pieroxy]

Oh my, how much will the 401th disk will cost you...

When a 300GB HDD costs less than 100Eur, the PC is the obvious solution, not mentionning it serves as a backup as well. All my DVDs, CDs, home movies, pictures, ... everything on a couple of HDDs. Backup is trivial (for pics and home movies, the rest still has its original media).

There is NO MATCH to that as of today, anywhere.

Mac Mini

[CastrTroy]

We basically need a VCR/DVD player sized component that can do everything. A Mac Mini would be a good start, small, quiet, and has enough power to do most PVR like features. It could be made twice as wide (lets hope not too much higher) and probably be able to do everything we need for the living room.

Between the lines

[wonkavader]

I'm thinking this product means two things.
  1. License fees to Intel, so no Linux support.
  2. DRM.

Pick Your Flavor...

[u16084]

I dont know about going to extremes saying it will REPLACE traditional PCs...

I get my work frustrations out with gaming. During the last 14 days, I came to the conclusion that gaming on the PC is "for more expandable then any console" but The maintenance involved is just not worth it. It SHOULD just work(tm?) I deal with machines problems at work, nothing fancy just your usual monkey help desk. So in theory, You just reformatted your pc, reinstalled windows, and started the painful restoration. (blockers) virus,spam,firewalls,blah blah blah. Once that is completed, you begin to reinstall your game lineups. And if you're a gamer, you got 10+ titles . Within a week you begin to feel a "sluggish" response. You click on the Yellow Shield in your task bar, and get the latest critical updates. Couple days later, your game begins to stutter. Even tho You/I took ALL the precautions, Not running IE,using (virus/spam) scanners etc etc... Within 2 months your Gaming RIG is now crawling. Drink a 12 pack, and back Step 1. Am I wrong in saying IF YOU ARE a daily, heavy windows users (downloading, running various apps, gaming) Your WINDOWS machine has about a 1 year lifespan before some thing critical begins to happen. Whats my point? I packed up my PC and got a console. It just works. Now, for the conclusion, since im sure you're already sick of reading this, and are preparing to mod me down, What if i had a so called MEDIA PC. TONS AND TONS of crap, movies, music etc etc. DO you actually think that user is going to backup 250-500 megs of shit? Do you really think that windows based machine will run smoothly? When will the next life saving critical patch come out and screach your system to a hault? For a media PC to work, it has to have uptime reliability. One of my web severs has been up for over 2 years. No, it doesnt run windows. This whole Microsoft Media PC is just a marketing ploy. Sure it works out of the box... but for how long?

Been saying this for a while...

[PFI_Optix]

The current concept of HTPC can't last. The average home has multiple TVs and even more viewers...a decentralized entertainment system makes no sense at all.

I envision (using existing methods and technology) a "server" with massive amounts of storage and six or so TV decoders. It will handle all the requests for media, from live TV to DVDs (in a carousel? since they don't want us copying them) to recorded TV to music and stream those out to what amounts to a thin client connected to the TV.

Microsoft is starting to do this with the XBOX 360 and its connectivity with MCE, but the problem there is that the 360 doesn't really extend the functions; as I understand it, it only has limited playback abilities. Imagine if the 360 could connect to MCE, select a channel, and display it...or schedule a show to be recorded by the server while you continue gaming.

We're just scratching the surface of how networking is going to affect the way we distribute and view television and movies.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Couch Surfing

[Len]

The existence of digital media adapters will totally remove the need to have a media centre PC taking up space in your living room, unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.

Since I got my media PC, I find that I can't watch TV or movies without periodically consulting IMDB and Google. Not sure if that's a good thing or not, but it's a habit now.

MP3s existed before the iPod too

[crovira]

but it took Apple to create the iTMS and the iPod to turn it into a mass media darling and sell 42,000,000 of the things (and counting, by the second!)

And its success is just an indication of how uncoupled the office really is from the home.

The reason Microsoft can't make inroads into the home is that they're too intimately tied to the office. (And the 'innovations' that they're they're trying to bring to the office OS are being firewalled from that office as a waste of time. Multi media features aren't WANTED in the office. My client went to Win2K only after NT 4.x was EOL'ed, killed off by MS. And they've got tens of thousands of PCs.)

Sorry Mr. Gates but they're not even interested in XP or Vista until they're forced into it.

Look for Apple to make BIG inroads in the 5-to-9 world and for Microsoft to stay stuck in the 9-to-5 world.

Re:Dual core *required* ?

[NewWorldDan]

A good scheduler can't increase throughput. If you're compressing 3 video streams at the same time, a dual 2 Ghz should always outperform a single 3 Ghz machine. And while the article seems to be mostly an add for Intel, I don't think the predictions are far from the mark. In the comming years, we will start to see the rise of the home server. It's far more economical to have a central server and cheap terminals scattered about the house than it is to have a unit in every room capable of recording, processing and archiving material. Especially if the server is a computer that you'd be buying anyway. Not to mention that it's far easier to sit down at a desktop with a mouse to edit and archive material to DVD or what not.

Re:advert

[Espectr0]

Sure, a dumb marketing campaign, just as like some little campaign called "Centrino" that we know that flopped.

Oh wait...