Convergence, TV's and PVR's

Convergence is a term you may not have heard yet; it is the merging of PC technology with home entertainment technology. I remember about 10 years ago I got all excited about one of those Multi Level Marketing companies that promised to make me rich, and its product was a set-top box, a home-entertainment component that would bring internet to the TV set. High speed internet was still not widely available, and the set-top box provided low-res, dial-up internet on TV. Unimpressive as this sounds now, I was excited about it, and I felt that having internet on your TV was the future, so I signed up. Eventually, I was shipped my first evaluation unit. I spent a bunch of money having a TV wall-mounted in my retail store so that I could demonstrate the unit to all my walk-in customers. Unfortunately, that early prototype was an absolute piece of garbage. The modem rarely connected to the internet, and when it did it was agonizingly slow, even when compared to dial-up on an ordinary PC, and the image-quality looked horrible on a low-resolution TV. I phoned the company to complain, and they told me to send the unit back; I was promised a replacement unit. This must have been shortly before the company went bankrupt, because I never saw the replacement unit, and never heard from the company again. I began to think that this “convergence” thing was just a flash in the pan, and would never materialize.

Fast-forward to the present, and convergence has become commonplace. There are all sorts of PVR (Personal Video Recorder) products on the market, the best known being Tivo, which offer far more utility than mere “internet on your TV”. With these products, internet-on-TV is a given; what the new products bring is the ability to record TV broadcasts onto a hard-disk for later viewing, the ability to view digital photo collections on TV, and to rip CD collections to mass-storage (a big hard-disk) for convenient listening without all the hassles of shuffling, storing, cleaning and cataloguing all those CD’s and CD cases. The only problem is deciding which technology to choose.

In my most recent edition of PC Magazine, the front page topic is about HDTV. HDTV technology and the shift to LCD PC monitor technology have accelerated the evolution of convergence. Before HDTV became commonplace, TV resolution was terrible compared to the resolution of PC monitors. Now that the technology is shared between the two, making it easy to view TV on your computer, or vice-versa, displaying PC output on your TV.

If you have a modern computer with decent specs and a large hard-drive, preferably 500 Gbytes or more, without too much effort or cost you can build your own Media Center PC which will nearly match the capabilities of a Tivo set-top. You need two things; a TV tuner card and an upgrade to Windows Media Center Edition. The windows upgrade provides you with a nifty remote control unit which will put all your entertainment center functions on your TV screen. Alternatively, you can buy a Media Center computer which has been designed specifically for placing with your existing stereo components; some are even rack-mounted systems which will blend right in with your existing components. One example is the Niveus Media Center (http://www.niveusmedia.com).

So there you are; an over-simplified guide (due to my word-quota restrictions each week for this column) to the world of Convergence. If it captures your imagination, try googling “PVR” or “DVR” on your computer.