Viiv Falls Flat 257
smilingman writes "The Washington Post (Retina Scan Required) is reporting that Intel's Viiv media center, which was supposed to revolutionize home entertainment and kill the living-room PC as we know it, fails miserably to deliver in its first incarnation. From the article: 'During a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, chief executive Paul S. Otellini unveiled Viiv -- a combination of hardware and software that would combine functions of the TV, the DVD player, the VCR and the video game console... In April, Viiv doesn't look much like that vision. On a typical Viiv box, Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion m7360y, it amounts to a smattering of free Web video clips and discounts on online music, movie and game rentals -- plus a nifty rainbow-hued Viiv sticker on the front of the computer.'"
same old story (Score:5, Insightful)
I think companies are trying to push these sorts of products out the door without fully understanding what consumers are looking for -- so far it has been nothing more than a lot of hype.
I think we have another 5 years before our living rooms become transformed.
_
Buy this t-shirt (cheap) [cafepress.com]
This can't possibly surprise anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, what did TFA expect it to be? A free lifetime membership to download all the movies you want?
What will matter are ease of installation, looks of final box (mostly out of Intel's hands) and noise... along with costs and a few necessary features, of course.
Same stuff, different tagline. (Score:5, Insightful)
Media Center software is not commercially viable (Score:5, Insightful)
Any half-decent MCPC will be able to, at a minimum, record televsion broadcasts through whatever medium the customer happens to use. This is not something that content producers or media corporations want. It grants far too much freedom to the consumer to keep high-value programs without buying them on physical media and to avoid advertising.
Also, it's very likely in the future that media producers will want to separate media playback and the home computer as much as possible. An easy way to cut down on content copying is simply to only chip purpose-built media players and not license chipped optical drives for PCs.
Media corporations have massive lobbying power, I can't see any large hardware vendor empowering the consumer in the way that a useful MCPC requires without running into large problems.
Re:Sounds like the manufacturers fault (Score:2, Insightful)
Viiv didn't work for the same reasons; it's nothing new.
Well now... (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I never expected Viiv to be a huge success, but I at least expected that there would be some benefit that would make it worthwhile. If many high end HTPCs are better then Viiv computers (which the article suggests), but available at a lower pricepoint, then Viiv will fail. Anyone could have figured that out.
Of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like Intel has put the cart quite a long way before the horse, and has released a platform with no worthwhile content. We'll see if the platform survives long enough to get any worthwhile content now, but I'm not hugely optimistic. Time will tell, I suppose!
No Surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
Easy Recipe to follow; (Score:5, Insightful)
20% Lets play it safe so we don't scare content providers away.
3% There are quite a few geeks on the IntarWeb who are doing this, lets do it ourselves so we can milk money from the $Mass_Market_Idiots
2% I heard about this whole TV-Internet convergence thing in 1996 and I have never seen anybody else get it right, maybe we can do it!
As a bonus, we can sell Processors equiped with SFT Technology!
(Super.Fast.Television)
We will call it SaFeTy Chip!
Re:same old story (Score:5, Insightful)
Old News (Score:1, Insightful)
VIIV has no soul (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is starting to dismantle some forms of traditional marketing. Hype alone doesn't cut it any more. Intel hasn't realized that. It created something that was pure hype and now it is seeing its balloon quickly deflated.
This is not a first for Intel to try this though. MMX makes the internet go faster. Anyone remember that?
Re:Easy Recipe to follow; (Score:4, Insightful)
What do they want it to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
The flash animations he's got show you having one PC, a Viiv compatible stereo that can recieve your music wirelessly, a TV in the frontroom linked to your PC so you can use it as a PVR and so on. No-one will ever set their PC up like that, especially not the John Smith from the street that decides he wants a nice new PC.
The only thing Viiv offers the home user is a bloody fast PC, built in wireless (On a desktop, not that useful!) and a nifty instant-standby button that's not quite instant but about 5 seconds, very good for a PC to be honest. But is it this nice "platform" they advertise it as? No. What about all the Viiv compatible kit (See stereo above) that's meant to happen? I'd like to see it out and a price tag myself.
Yes. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This can't possibly surprise anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Things Just Work... (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst experience of all came when I tried to view Intel's own showcase of Viiv content. At first, clicking this button yielded a "Windows Media Center Edition required" error. After rebooting the computer to try again, I was presented with a lengthy license agreement and an ActiveX installation dialog. The subsequent download seemed to stall out when the HP-bundled Norton Internet Security firewall warned that "EntriqMediaServer" was a high-risk program that it should always block.
Naturally, that was a Viiv component.
So, the Mighty Microsoft "Media Juggernaut" (as David Berlind over at ZDNet likes to call it) mixes genes with the Invincible Intel Viiv and we get: errors left and right and the anti-malware proggy telling you that a Viiv content delivery component is dangerous!
Priceless.
Say, I have a suggestion: Why doesn't Intel just worry about making better CPUs, Microsoft worry about getting an operating system out the door that your average 14-year-old can't crack from 7,000 miles away, and the both of them leaving cheap home entertainment devices to the Chinese manufacturers like Apex? Or would that be asking too much?
Re:same old story (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what happens when you try to save money on focus groups. Instead of listening to what customers want they're trying to force fit what they think they want.
Here's a clue: You'll never be able to figure out what customers want from the corner office on mahogany row. You can't skimp on focus groups and test marketing and don't think you can make the MPAA and your customers happy. You're going to have to pick one or the other.
And now you know what happens when you pick the MPAA.
RIAA/MPAA Promise is a Cluster of Greed. (Score:3, Insightful)
The key question is what promise you are talking about. The promise of content implies co-operation with big dumb publishers. Those big dumb publishers have extracted almost every content penny out of Itunes, and left Apple with the crumbs of what they make selling hardware. The artists, as usual did not get anything. The end user gets a more restricted version of what they used to get on CD and competition gets buried if all goes according to plan.
Apple, by moving to Intel, seems to have made some of the same promisses that M$ has about how to enforce their big dumb publisher promises. The speculation is that Apple got suckered into the Intel DRM that the *AAs have promised to pour their content into. We shall see about content availability, but DRM can not and will not work on a general purpose computing device. The only reason Apple stuff has worked in the past is because they were the only snake in their pit. We shall also see how well they get along with Intel and if the new dongles will work any better than the old ones.
The HP eXPerience described above is a preview of what DRM is all about. It's not really new, as anyone who's tried to use WMP knows. The primary problem is that M$ is root and you are not. They have made a system where they can add and remove files and components but you can't. When you multiply this by the problems of non free software, which requires yet another set of rules, you get much more than the sum of your troubles. Each vendor on your system wants to be root and non of them can really co-operate because they keep their source code in a vault. The only way a general purpose computing device can work the way you want it is for you to be root. That pretty much rules out DRM for anything but set top boxes. That would make the *AAs happy enough but not as happy as eliminating general purpose computing.
Every free computer with an internet connection is a potential competitor. See Star Wreck [starwreck.com] and The internet Archive Music Files [archive.org]. It does not take much to make a movie and even less to make music.
DRM, at best, is a loser. At it's worst, you get what the Washington post reporter saw. The people who want copyright to last "forever less a day" and have sold you the same content on LPs, CDs and now as bits, won't ever give you a good deal. When they butt heads with Bill Gates, you get a real mess.
Intel has never had much success with products (Score:3, Insightful)
Intel falls flat again. (Score:2, Insightful)
They pushed P6 until it broke.
They pushed Netburst until it broke.
They seem to be pushing P6-2 until it breaks.
Meanwhile, everything else (e.g. VIIV) is flopping. Why is it that when a business grows to a certain size, it becomes useless? Look how small AMD is compared to intel, and compare the two companies' product lineups right now.
I think the future will be distributed and groups/corpuses will be limited in size, after the mammals (say, F/OSS) eat the eggs of the dinosaurs.
Re:The concept of "delivering on the promise..." (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to doubt it.
First, Intel doesn't actually make the box. As the article says, Intel makes the standard. It's up to the OEMS (eg, HP, Sony, Gateway, Dell, etc.) to implement the standard from a hardware perspective. These people can dance around, cut pieces, change pieces, etc.
So, in theory, HP starts with a box that works. But then they need to add more software. Some of this is done to make life easier for the user--after all, I want my HP Camera to work seamlessly with my HP Computer, right? So HP's Imaging Group adds their software. Some of this is the same sort of thing that Microsoft has included with Windows Media Center Edition--software for doing slide shows, etc. So you now have two programs for managing your photos--the one in Windows and the one that the HP Imaging Group wrote. Next, the Business Development group comes along. They make a deal with Adobe, where Adobe will pay them 25 cents for each copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements Crippleware (works with up-to 75 photos--send $40 to Adobe to get the full version) that they put on a computer. HP also might have a deal with Symantec, for example, to include Norton Internet Security. HP includes it for free and gets, say, $25 when the user signs up with Symantec for product updates. Internet Security is a good thing, right?
So even if some employee does use it and comes back and says, "This is a complete mess," who do you get rid of? Well, you can't get rid of Microsoft's software because it's "part of the operating system" or because Microsoft will raise the price of Windows unless you include it. The HP Imaging Group will remind you that all HP products should work together, so you can't get rid of their software. And Business Development will tell you that they make money off of every copy of some crappy sampleware that they stick on the machine, so you can't get rid of any of that stuff.
So there isn't really a solution, other than build your own or go to a smaller company that will build one for you...
Re:same old story (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want watered down, sugared up, luke-warm pap, then ya, you just go run a company using Focus Groups to help you "focus" your products.
Focus them right down the drain.
The problem is, what people say they want, and what they will really enjoy over the long term are usually completely different. You have to have vision and guts, and give people what you know they *need*, to love your product over the long term.
That's why Coke (in all its throat-burning, belch inducing glory) beats Pepsi (flat, watered down, and super-sweet, just like the Focus Groups like it!) -- year after year.
That's why Ford Mustang (loud, brash, cheap, plentiful, and easy to tear down and build up) kicked Camaro -- right out of the industry.
That's why American servicemen pry AK-47s out of dead Iraqi fingers, and toss their M-16s in the back of the HMV. Drop the AK-47 in the sand, kick it around a bit, pick it up -- it goes "bang" every time.
So, keep your "Focus Group" Clippy-ridden, DRM-stuffed, memory-hungry spyware-addled, VIIV-infested tripe. I'll keep my bullet-proof network of trivially remotely maintained servers, not paying a red CENT to any of these MBA winners and their lame "Focus Group". Thanks, Linus.
Thank you for your attention; you may return to your regularly scheduled program...
Re:Yes, I do remember that. It was different. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not kiddin. Back in the day it was nothing for your cpu to be raped from a WinModem driver that was poorly optimized [or scheduled for P5 at the time].
So having MMX to do the DSP work for the modem could make your downloads faster if only by allowing you to connect at higher speeds and still have CPU left over to run your TCP stack.
Tom
Re:The concept of "delivering on the promise..." (Score:3, Insightful)
And this is always what kills. Some douche thinks that the $.25 per machine they make is where their company makes all their money... never realizing that all those extra ingredients are what make their computers SUCK and that prevents ANYONE from buying one. They always seem to miss the fact that no stuff sold == no profit; that somehow all their cross-promotional agreements are what will keep the company rolling in dough.
"You know, boss, I've been looking at our records... if we fire all the employees and sell all our office equipment, our expenses will drop to zero and the rest will be PURE PROFIT!!!!!111"