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 July 1, 2006 My Whole-House Manifesto
We are not alone in this pursuit. Most of us would rather buy a single great piece of gear and install it in a central location than have three or four mediocre examples of the same product category spread about the house. Parents want centralized control over what’s going to the family’s various speakers and media displays. TiVo devotees with multiple displays want a single control with which they can route images to any or all displays at the same time. Hell, it would be nice to find devices with multiple HDMI switching and outputs -- and how about the ability to drive a good-looking 1080p signal farther than 50 feet? No one manufacturer has the answer, though some have pieces of it -- notably Gefen, Inc., whose extenders, switchers, converters, and distribution amplifiers can get a signal to pretty much anywhere you can run a CAT-5 cable. For a price. Let’s assume a fairly simple four-input system of DirecTV/TiVo plus upconverting DVD plus Blu-ray/HD DVD plus DVD recorder. To be able to handle just those four signals, you’ll have to get Gefen’s soon-to-be-released 4x4 HDMI matrix, which costs $1999 USD. But then you’ll have to get the HDMI into an HDCP-compliant CAT-5 converter. Gefen’s HDMI Extreme CAT-5 Extender, also not yet available, will stretch your signal all over the house for $499 per room. These devices don’t like standard CAT-5 cable, so plan on another few hundred dollars for cable, and then you’ll have to spring for a Crestron remote or at least an IR repeater system. Cost for the average three-TV home: roughly $5000, and that doesn’t even include getting audio signals distributed. I’m not picking on Gefen -- God bless them for at least trying to solve the problem -- but you see where we’re headed. Cable companies and satellite providers are trying to sidestep the issue by telling us we don’t want the ability to have a media center and would rather have a converter box at every TV in every room, ostensibly so everyone can have his or her own choices. There are two problems with this model. First, it ignores the fact that our systems are getting more integrated; we don’t need systems that resegregate our home entertainment. Second, these companies charge us for each and every extra box. Good for them, bad for us. This is reminiscent of the time when the phone company owned all the phones and charged us extra for each one we used. We revolted, Bell was broken, and now you just pay for the line into your house. If you want, you can have ten phones in every room. Another important issue: American consumers are currently on a spending spree of unprecedented wildness, buying new high-definition displays left and right: $14.6 billion worth in 2004, and a projected $25.7 billion in 2009. And despite the Moore’s Law drop in the prices of digital displays, we’ve been scooching up our average purchase price. That means bigger screens, more features, and more TVs -- about three -- per household. It means we now have more TVs than people! And what are people buying? Flat screens, front projectors, and small-footprint rear projectors. Who wants a big converter box squatting next to a nice flat display?
Plus, these displays not only produce gorgeous pictures with HD sources, you can use your computer with them. That means you should also be able to wirelessly use your laptop with any display in any room, along with that room’s audio system. And how about a video game with 1080p images and 5.1-channel sound, played on a Sony PlayStation 3 (if it ever makes it to market) that can be carried from living room to kitchen to bedroom without ever having to be turned off? Why can’t we do this? I’m sure I’ll get letters from fellow nerds with some technical know-how who’ve cobbled together homemade systems to cover some of these problems. I have too. Such systems -- industry insiders call them "sneakerware" -- can meet most of our needs but cover only some of the problems, and often clunkily. Better solutions must be found soon. Currently, SBC, Verizon, and Time Warner are slugging it out, trying to make us believe that the most important thing in our lives is the convenience of having our phone, cable, wireless, and Internet bills on one piece of paper. But we’ll still have a hopeless snarl of cables with little hope of central control. These companies are exhibiting the most grotesque form of marketing-maven greed. Do they think we’re lemmings? Three companies are trying to find better ideas. Microsoft, bless their addled, antiquated thinking, tried to make everything run through Windows Media Center. Too buggy and too much trouble. DirecTV is hard at work on what they believe will take their company to the next level of growth: the Home Media Center. Note that third word: The Center is intended to distribute video, music, and photos, and future iterations will include games, computers, and more. The HMC is scheduled to appear later this year; we’ll see how well it works. I came across the most ambitious and forward-looking ideas in a conversation with Edward Butler, a technology strategist with Intel. The chip company agrees that there should be a way to accomplish all I’ve said, and a lot more. Their ultimate goal is for everything in your house that’s plugged into the power grid -- audio, video, displays, computer, voice systems, air-conditioning, lighting, kitchen appliances -- to include an Intel chip that reports to a central control system. Imagine the possibilities -- whole-house home-entertainment nirvana. Of course, Intel is imagining selling a lot of chips. They also face one big obstacle: using the same in-house lines as the dirty signals from your local power company. I remember the early days of the Internet, when Amazon began to offer things like shopping carts, product notifications, one-click buying, and recommendations based on your buying patterns. Big companies like CDNow thought such far-out concepts were too much of a good thing, that all customers wanted were old-fashioned, tried-and-true catalogs. Amazon won. Manufacturers need to be aware that another paradigm shift is now underway, and the winner will be the company that delivers the most creative way of giving us the most control most invisibly, with the least hassle and the least expense. And it should appear both centralized and locally controlled. Can we please just hurry up the process? …Wes Marshall
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We Marshalls are trying to figure out a
way to get high-definition video and high-quality audio signals from a central location
distributed around our house -- easily, seamlessly, simply, inexpensively, without a
glitch, and without a PhD in electrobiochemomechanical engineering. We don’t want to
send it out on the Internet and then retrieve it, we don’t want to resort to
jury-rigging, and we don’t want to install a separate system in each and every room.
We want to be able to select from among a bevy of high-quality sources in whatever room we
happen to be in, and enjoy what we want, when we want, at the resolution we want.