Economist Looks at the Digital Home

spisska writes "There is an excellent article this week in The Economist looking at the "digital home" and at what cable, telecom, internet, and hardware companies are doing to create the new entertainment nerve centers of the future. The article touches on what exists today (CDs, DVDs, etc), what is in production or preparation from various companies (MS MCE, IPTV, music downloads, etc), DRM, interoperability, and competing standards, among other topics. Although there is no mention of MythTV or Linux, it is a pretty solid analysis of the market as it is now and concludes that vendors are trying to hype a market into existence where there is no great consumer demand. A choice quote: "'If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed,' says Peter Lee, an executive at Disney". The article concludes: "As John Barrett, research director at Parks Associates, says, 'it seems that we've concocted a new variant of the 'paperless' office.' This, you recall, was the consensus a decade or so ago among technophiles (but almost nobody else), that computer technology would save our forests by freeing us from having to read and write on paper. Today's variant, says Mr Barrett, is 'no more tapes, CDs, DVDs, discs.' In other words, expect them to be around for a very long time to come.""

Comments

From TFA...

[payndz]

There is a third possibility. This is that the wars continue, but consumers continue not to care.

DING! We have a winner! Almost everybody will go right along buying individual components as they always have done, and not caring if they're interoperable or not. How many people even bother to buy a universal remote to replace the four or five you'll find in most homes now? (TV, DVD, VCR, CD, cable...)

'Convergence' of entertainment devices in the home has one very big problem - "What if it breaks?" Since the PC has a reputation of being the most complicated and troublesome gadget in the home already, piling in all the functions from every other box is not going to make people feel safe.

If your DVD player packs up, you buy a new DVD player - these days, you can pick them up from the supermarket with your groceries for little more than the price of an actual DVD. But if the DVD player in your super-duper Media Center PC packs up...

And if the computer itself packs up, then you lose all your entertainment systems in one go, not just one element. And what if, in this fabulous all-digital future, you've bought music, movies, TV shows, etc, that exist as nothing more than data on a hard drive? Are they all lost too?

MS can go on about 'educating' the consumer all they want (and the line from some MS guy along the lines of 'the consumer doesn't know what they want until we show them' really was a perfect example of that company's arrogance), but most people are unwilling to put all their eggs in one basket. Especially with hardware that is associated with the words 'crash' and 'virus'.