We’ve got all your TV needs right here”¦

Hey, you know what word I haven’t heard in a while? Convergence. Remember convergence? That was the marketing term used to describe the marvellous marriage of media, boldly predicted during the last tech boom but only now progressing in a meaningful way. Of course, as usually happens when things are boldly predicted, the gist of the concept is approximately right but the actual form things are taking is different.

Let’s see. What was it that convergence was originally supposed to mean? Something about a big corporation supplying all your entertainment and information needs via a unified media platform—probably a big TV blessed with the sort of mystical “interactive user control” that has literally been in the works since the 1970s. Well, the big TVs are here but interactive TV has yet to arrive. And after three decades of waiting, we can probably safely assume it’ll never get here—it’s an idea that has managed to journey from “ahead of its time” to “well past its time” without ever actually having its time. Why? Near as I can figure, it’s because TVs are the wrong machine to use. They’re just dumb monitors, and by the time you build enough brains into them to make them useful, you’d have been better off just figuring out how to connect a big monitor to a computer.

And that’s the stage we’re at now. There are lots of computers with video outputs, and lots of big televisions to connect them to. In fact, the major theme of the recent 2007 Consumer Electronics Show seemed to be products to get your digital content off the computer and make it available on other platforms: your TV, an iPod or other portable video/audio device, even an Internet-connected laptop halfway around the world, so that you don’t have to miss Smallville while you’re away on a business trip. Or maybe you want to listen to your favourite Net radio station using your stereo system. Perhaps you want to eliminate the hassle of switching CDs and would rather rip them all onto a hard drive.

Now, I’ll acknowledge that setting up an on-demand digital archive of movies, music, and TV shows isn’t something many people care about, at least not yet. And I’ll admit that setting up such a system is a bit of a hassle—it’s been possible for years, but only for the motivated minority—so that’s a bit of a barrier. True, there’s a media-centre version of Windows (with features destined to show up in the newly launched Vista operating system) and a Mac program called Front Row, but those are just remote-controlled interfaces lying on top of existing programs that don’t really turn your computer into a grandmother-friendly multimedia solution. Basically, if you know enough to figure out what’s wrong when a video file won’t run or the computer can’t locate your music folder, you don’t really need the interface, except for the remote-control feature. Personally, I found it easier to temporarily connect my laptop’s video output to a TV to play movies, or plug my iPod directly into my stereo’s auxiliary audio-input port.

But, as all the new-media product announcements demonstrate, the reasons you might want to computerize your living room are growing. Movies and TV shows recently joined music files in being sold on-line. If you locate a good video on YouTube, you might want to play it for a roomful of people, without having to lead them, three at a time, into the den to watch it on the computer. Or maybe you’d like to show off your collection of digital photographs on that nice HDTV set you own.

One solution is to move a computer into your living room. This needn’t be too messy or expensive. The last time I dropped by Simply Computing (101–1690 West Broadway), they had a 42-inch flat-panel set hooked up to a tiny Mac mini computer (which is slightly larger than a stack of five CD cases). Add a wireless keyboard and mouse to stash beside the couch, and you’ve got everything you need (except, perhaps, enough storage space for everything you own). You’d have the Internet, playback of video and audio, and the option of buying an external hard drive or two to hold your archives.

Or, consider Apple TV, the announcement of which was largely overshadowed at the recent Macworld conference by the iPhone. For $350, you get a small box that offers the new digital High Definition Multimedia Interface and component video outputs, and can receive wireless signals from up to five Mac or Windows computers. Since it has a built-in 40-gig hard drive, you can even manage files with one computer so that your latest content is automatically made available. It’s not quite as useful as a full-scale computer, but it’s a good way to bridge the digital realm/living room gap. If nothing else, it’s a strong indication of the sorts of new-media devices being devised. Sooner or later, some company is going to figure out how to build it all into a really effective package that’ll do everything from recording TV broadcasts to providing big-screen Web surfing, ideally with an interface that even the technophobes among us will find friendly and easy to use. And it’s close—I can feel it.