Part V, the final installment of my post-CES chronicles; each of these posts includes a quick look back on 2005 trends and a quick discussion of products introduced at CES 2006. This installment: Convergence
In 2005…
Windows XP Media Center Edition PC sales finally took off – but as replacements for home PCs (wherever in the home they may reside, not necessarily the living room), and using traditional vertical box form factors, not the electronics-rack-style Home Theater PC. With Microsoft dropping the requirement for TV tuners, many of the XPMCE PCs were just that – regular PCs with a nifty 10 foot user interface for media control. Meanwhile, PVR functionality was integrated into the cable and satellite box in a big way, and moved time shifting into many more homes. The tech media declared place shifting the next big thing. Place shifting, the notion of watching your content anywhere you are using a web browser, was first introduced by Orb Networks (limited to PC-based content), followed by Sony’s LocationFree TV (control primarily of live TV) and then by Sling Media’s SlingBox (which allows viewing and control of nearly all content, including shows saved to a TiVo or ReplayTV).
At CES...
Sling Media introduced a Windows Mobile client for the SlingBox, solving one of the big problems of place shifting: very few people spend so much time on the road that they would be willing to buy a gadget to gain access to their home content. But moving the content to any Windows Mobile smartphone is more generally useful; everyone has some down time in their schedule that could be filled with even more TV! SlingBox for Windows Mobile also bypasses a lot of the services that wireless carriers are hoping to sell to consumers directly, and in this sense, it is an extremely disruptive technology.
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