Tech Show Train Wreck: Warring Formats
Connections is a prevailing theme for this year's Consumer Electronics Show, where more than 120,000 techies will gather in Las Vegas starting Monday to gawk at the latest and greatest gadgets and services.
Wired and wireless nets that will fling our music and video around the home, and around the world, are the next push by the companies that brought us high-definition TV and personal computing. The new nets would allow us to record something, say, on our living-room TiVo in high definition, and watch it in another room or even in a hotel room while traveling. Problem is, nobody's playing together.
To illustrate the train wreck that's developing, take a look at what will be one of the bigger connection announcements–about one within one box. LG Electronics says it will unveil the first universal HD disk player, which will play Blu-Ray and HD DVD disks. Those are two formats backed, respectively, by Sony and Toshiba, each of which has a separate clique of friends in electronics and movie studios.
Neither is selling many of the players, partly because they're overpriced at $500 and up, and mostly because nobody wants to buy the next Betamax, which lost out to VHS in the last video-format fight. So LG's player would be a breakthrough that might finally get demand flowing.
Then there's the approach of Time Warner, which says it will introduce a Total HD disk that will include a Blu-Ray and HD DVD version of each movie.
That should clear things up, no? Well, unfortunately, an even worse divide seethes among warring camps in home media networks. The ability to move our video and music is a great idea, but we may not be buying soon, either, because of many formats, standards, and something called "digital rights management" gumming up the works.
That final issue is the one that prevents your iTunes songs from playing on a Microsoft Zune–everybody wants to trap you in their format, forcing you to buy their hardware along with the song you want. The issue isn't going away soon.
Neither is the battle between the consumer electronics and computing folks. In the PC camp, chipmakers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices are expected to announce new extensions of their Viiv and AMD Live approaches for connecting PCs to consumer electronics like TVs and DVD players. Microsoft is rumored to have ready its Windows Home Server, and computer networking giant Cisco will unveil its Cable Bypass Box that for $500 will allow consumers to connect the Internet, with its movies and shows, directly to the TV.
But wait–makers of those TVs and set-top boxes have their own ideas for how to connect everything. Sanyo will showcase a wireless HD projector, which should make it easier to have a DVD player in the front of a room and a projector in the back. And Samsung will demonstrate tech that transmits TV signals wirelessly to home and car screens, which clearly isn't ready for market with a working name of Advanced Vestigial Sideband.
So, it'll be a show with lots of new connections. Interesting, yes, but too bad there are just as many disconnections.