There’s been a lot of talk for a long time about the convergence of the PC and the living room. Even back in the early 90s it was thought to be just around the corner. Remember back in ‘94-’95… Time Warner’s “Orlando”:1 project?

Well, a lot has changed since the early ’90s, so I’m feeling a little bold and will say that this time convergence is really just around the corner. Why?

* Digital TV Screens (e.g., LCDs and Plasmas) — Computing actually looks good… erh, no *great*, on a digital flat screen. Computing on an old-school analog CRT?? You’re just wasting your time.
* Broadband — Broadband is making video on the net a reality. Just go exploring on “Google Video”:2 or “You Tube”:3, and you’ll see what I am talking about.
* Streaming — Video streaming now works. The server software is much more mature, lots of people have broadband and sites know how to scale (most of the time). In addition, things like the Flash player (found on Google Video and You Tube) eliminates the need for any add-on viewing software.
* Personal Content — Digital cameras and camcorders (which are getting closer to merging all the time) give people a wealth of content to share with friends and family.
* PVRs –Tivo is just a computer disguised as a consumer-electronics device. Not that PVRs have been at all that successful, but for the people that have them there is no going back. PVR owners are used to hooking up a “computer” to their TV monitors.
* Vista — Microsoft is serious about “owning” the PVR space. This is just going to make PVRs a lot better and more ubiquitous.
* Apple — Sooner or later they will really get into this space. If Apple doesn’t release a PVR or PVR software soon, I’d be surprised.

That’s just a few points that I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure there’s lots more.

There is at least one place where convergence has taken place — my TV room. I’ve now got a PC hooked up to a “Samsung LN-R268W”:6 that I am borrowing from a friend. At 1360×768 resolution computing looks awesome on it. Such a big improvement over my CRT TV.

What was on “TV” last night in the picture above? I had two streams going side-by-side. On one side I had the ASP Pro surf event streaming “live from Australia”:5, and when things got slow, I had a “presentation”:4 that Will Wright (the designer of The Sims video game series) gave streaming from Google Video.

Zoinger says, this time it’s for real.

[6(Amazons page on the Samsung LN-R268W)]http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/tech-data/B0009612GQ/104-7862414-0324726

[5(ASP Pro from Snapper Rocks)]http://www.aspworldtour.com/quikpro/

[4(Will Wrights Spore presentation on Google Video)]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-262774490184348066

[3(You Tube homepage)]http://youtube.com

[2(Google Video homepage)]http://video.google.com

[1(Wikipedia on Orlando)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Service_Network