I asked my colleague, Nick Matsakis, to write an article about the perils of today’s home entertainment centers and how Apple might save the day. It’s an excellent read:
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p>Last week I visited my parents. Since I left home, such visits typically involve a round of maintenance on the family computers and other electronics. Though I used to dread cleaning up the Windows machine, now there is a greater peril: the home entertainment system.
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p>It wasn’t always this way; in high school I enjoyed rewiring the system to do tricks like showing a video from the first floor VCR upstairs. But last summer my parents installed an impressive entertainment system including 42″ hi-def plasma TV, DVD player, CD player, digital cable, and surround sound speakers in the walls. There are four large remotes floating around the room, each claiming to be the one remote to rule them all, with dozens of buttons and modes to prove their worth. I’ve visited them a number of times since it was installed, and still have no idea how to run it.
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p>My loathing of this system reached a new high during my latest visit, when it somehow entered a state where it refused to display anything on the TV. My sister seemed to have some notion of what was going on even though she couldn’t fix it either. “You shouldn’t use the Samsung remote! Yes, I know the TV is a Samsung, but you shouldn’t use that remote to control it.” she said. I decided to watch a DVD on the iMac in the next room instead.
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p>To me, this is clear evidence that home entertainment technology is completely broken—assembling a working home entertainment system from its components is now more complicated than assembling a PC. With a PC, the components are designed to work in concert using standard interfaces and it’s clear who’s in charge: the operating system. Home entertainment components instead have the most minimal interface to each other possible and each comes with its own power supply, clock, and remote control that begs to be put in control of all the other components, even though it’s likely not designed appropriately for that function.
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p>As a result, today’s home entertainment interface differs little from a command-line interface: you have at your disposal a large set of micro-commands, the buttons on the remotes, that need to be issued in a precise order to achieve the desired effect. You can alias buttons on one remote to another, but watching a DVD typically entails setting at least three components to the right “mode” to route the media through the system (and often the choice of buttons depends on the current state of the system). Most normal people would rather select “play DVD” from an on-screen menu and have the system configure itself to play a DVD. Home entertainment needs an integrated interface, and to do that it needs an operating system.
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p>It’s for this reason that this week’s announcement of Front Row by Apple is so intriguing. It’s not that Front Row’s interface is groundbreaking; rich on-screen menus are the norm with today’s DVD, PVR, and digital cable systems. But the problem with these menu systems is they each live in their own little world with their own commands requiring their own remote (how else would you set all those clocks?). What’s interesting about Front Row is that it combines controls for playing disparate media into a single interface with a single simple remote.
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p>More intriguing still is that, unlike Microsoft’s Media Center PC, Front Row doesn’t even try to talk to the components of a home entertainment system. Rather than interfacing with a television tuner, it assumes you’re going to watch TV that you’ve downloaded from Apple (or requires that you find some other means to get video programming yourself). Apple seems committed to its closed world, arguing again that by making the whole widget they can provide the best experience.
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p>Conventional wisdom would say that Apple alone can’t beat the best efforts of an entire industry, but will an industry that can’t decide on a video disc format be able to integrate their products well enough to be controlled by a six-button remote? Front Row and the iTunes Video Store, with its four shows, are so meager in scope that it’s almost laughable, yet in the last three years, Apple has been tremendously aggressive in expanding its digital entertainment platform while the home entertainment industry doesn’t appear to be building a platform at all.
I always thought Samsung, Sony, et al are in the business of selling complete systems, the components are just a way to create a lot of price points, and not lose an HDTV sale to someone with a better DVD player.
well, Apple is just doing the same, except without faking support for other vendor’s components.
walled gardens applied to home entertainment.
Certainly the consumer electronics companies would prefer that you purchase all your components from them. There are some advantages from purchasing from the same supplier and your components might look slightly nicer stacked together. But is there a manufacturer who has produced components that work together with a single integrated interface? If so, I haven’t seen it.
I don’t know for certain, but I suspect the problem is that the industry is so cutthroat. One strategy for producing this display would be for a company to produce the same old DVD, TV, tuner, units they always have, but also create a control bus that could connect the units together to be driven by a single CPU (this could be ethernet or firewire, for example). So, if you bought your units from the same supplier, you’d get this great benefit, but otherwise, they’d just work the way they always had.
The problem with this strategy is that what I’m describing is too expensive to just tack on and hope that someone uses. The market is too price sensitive to justify the expense of developing, manufacturing, and most importantly marketing such a solution. People are used to components that barely work together and see one DVD player as being pretty much the same as another and aren’t going to pay anything more for the system unless they get the full benefit.
In brief, it just seems easier to add (or continue to add) entertainment to personal computers than it does to add computation and networking to home entertainment.
my old Aiwa had a bus wire that connected the components. unfortunately, I could only use their CD changer with their amp.
my current Sony uses all regular connectors between the components, in fact there are three different ways to connect the CD changer to the amp.
but if I use the remote to play a CD, the amp automatically switches to receive audio from two of these inputs. so there is an integrated feel to it.
I’d definitely love it more if they used USB/firewire/WiFi and went smart about the connectivity. and I do suspect we’ll get there, probably not by will of the manufacturers, but pressure from FrontRow and Media Center.
If you have hit the point where you can’t figure out a remote control scheme and the fact that a TV is normally controlled by the Cable/Sattelite box, then you have truly hit a poor state. You remind me of the old man who can’t figure out how to set the time on his VCR and has his grandson do it.
We’ve got several of those ‘universal’ devices (that came with each of our remote controllable devices) and none of them really do it because they lack some level of granularity that the actual remote device has. You simply have to learn when to do what with what, but that’s too complex for you and the fact that your parents have figured this out but you can’t is a testament to your lack of capacity.
The most humorous thing is that you want to use a single purpose Mac (implying that you’d rather have multiple devices for multiple purposes) but would rather avoid havign to actually learn the purpose of multiple remotes (multiple devices for multiple purposes).