The 2004 Ownership and Trend Report from the Home Technology Monitor shows that advanced video devices are becoming more and more popular in home entertainment.
According to the study of US homes:
In-Stat/MDR are projecting that the worldwide market for digital tuners in set-top boxes and PC TV cards will be worth US$3.8 billion (€3.12 billion) by 2008.
PC TV cards are growing rapidly in popularity, due to PCs being more readily accepted as the entertainment centre of households. Many lifestyle PCs are being sold with cards preinstalled and preconfigured – and even if a PC doesn’t ship with one, the installation of a decent card will enable the owner to turn their PC into a fully functional PVR.
Consumers now expect their PC to be able to satisfy all of their entertainment needs, and television is an important aspect of this. A home entertainment computer without digital television will not be acceptable for much longer.
Motherboard manufacturers are also getting in on the act, and are producing boards with integrated tuners. Motherboards have always demonstrated a trend for integration – many features which previously required an expansion card, like 5.1 sound, RAID arrays, graphics accelerators and Bluetooth, are now built into some boards.
In-Stat predict that international growth (i.e. non-US) will be key, and that Europe will continue to lead the market for some time. Lifestyle PCs are remarkably popular in Europe, with many major brands such as Sony, HP and Shuttle doing well out of products aimed specifically it the entertainment niche. Asia is rapidly climbing into second place – will there be a time when Asia becomes the world’s largest entertainment market?
The DVD Forum has ratified the new H.264 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) for inclusion in the forthcoming High Definition DVD platform.
The H.264 codec, formerly known H.26L, was was developed by the Motion Picture Experts Group (responsible of course, for the various MPEG formats) and the International Telecommunication Union, and has now been ratified into the MPEG-4 codec. The codec enables a variety of video content to be compressed for transmission and decompressed for playback in a highly efficient way.
Apple has already made an announcement to the effect that H.264 will be included in a release of its QuickTime platform next year.
“Apple is firmly behind H.264 because it delivers superb quality digital video and is based on open standards that no single company controls,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing in a statement.
H.264 is intended to be used on a number of platforms, and as such covers a wide spectrum of bandwidth requirements – from HD television to mobile phones. The codec is highly efficient, and has been demonstrated playing back 1920×1080, 24fps HD movies at up to half the data rate of MPEG-2. Less data means room for more channels – or better audio and video.
Don’t expect HD playback performance on your new mobile phone – Apple’s test detailed above required a dual processor G5 to do the playback. The new codec will be more suited to digital television broadcasts to phones and mobile movies with a much lower resolution.
How H.254 works – and it’s not too technical, either
Despite disappointing sales and no release date for Europe, Sony’s PSX home media centre – a unit consisting of a home media centre, a PVR, and a PS2 – has had a couple of new models added to the range.
The DESR-5100 has a 160mb hard drive, the DESR-7100 has a 250mb drive. Both look the same as the original PSX, though there will be a limited edition silver 5100.
Scheduled for release on July 1, the main enhancements are related to the PSX’s DVD recording features – users can now manually set the bit rate for recording, meaning that longer movies can fit on a disk. There are also 50 templates for creating DVD menus, along with much-demanded DVD+RW/DVD-RW compatibility.
Online PS2 capability has been improved ever so slightly – you can now browse the Central Station bulletin board – but that’s it. No online Twisted Metal Black for PSX owners then. If you have one of the older PSXs, a firmware upgrade coming along on the 15th will add all of the new features, minus the disk upgrades of course.
The units are expected to sell for about 74,000 and 95,000 yen respectively (€562 and €722), but there is still no release for Europe and the US.
Sony’s new range of in-car navigation systems, the NV-XYZ 33, 55 and 77 feature remarkably advanced 3D mapping, media players, GPS, hard drives and based on the Linux kernel.
The 3D mapping interface is clear and brightly coloured, and features representations of the actual buildings that you’re driving past to find that little store in Akihabara that has some of those Tom Nook figurines left over. In fact, the 800 x 480 pixel touch screen display throws around so many pastel polygons it looks just like Crazy Taxi. Depending on your driving style, of course.
Advertising for petrol stations and fast food outlets are built into the maps, making the 3D world you’re driving through even more accurate/annoying.
As the systems are for the Japanese market exclusively, maps are only available for Tokyo and other locations in the country.
Other software supplied with the units include a web browser, an email client and a word processor (no doubt for filing out those insurance claims after being distracted by too many in-car gadgets).
The 200 x 104 x 49 mm units are based on a MontaVista Hard-Hat Linux distribution, all models have CF card sockets for wireless cards and a USB2.0 interface for connecting to your PC. DVDs can be downloaded to the unit’s hard drive for viewing on the road.
The units are priced at 155,400 (33), 176,000 (55) and 207,900 (77) yen respectively. (€1164, €1319 and €1558).
The Digital Radio Development Bureau (DRDB) has claimed that the UK’s £45 million (€67.75 million) market is going to double by the end of the year.
There are currently 547,000 digital radios in use in the UK, and this is hoped to expand to 1 million by 2005.
Why the sudden jump? One theory is that personal stereos and portable music systems equipped with digital radios are about to hit the market, rapidly increasing the installed base. As the cost of integrating a digital tuner into consumer electronics declines, many more audio devices that featured analogue only tuners will get digital ones by default.
The DRDB is a trade body funded and supported by the BB and commercial radio operators, with a remit to ensure the swift adoption of digital radio in the UK, so you can imagine that they’re pleased at this proposed sudden spike in uptake.
Trouble at TiVo this week – DirectTV, controlled by News Corp, has sold its 55% equity stake in the PVR company. TiVo still has a contract to supply DirectTV with PVRs until February 2007, but news of the sale caused the company’s shares to drop 14.5%.
The news comes only a few days after DirectTV vice chairman Eddy Hartenstein resigned from TiVo’s board. These two events have cause others to speculate that DirectTV may wish to bring in a new PVR supplier, such as NDS.
DirectTV is TiVo’s biggest source of subscribers, a dependence that was causing concern to observers.
As more manufacturers continue to launch PVR product lines, TiVo’s subscription model is making less sense to consumers: why pay a US$12.95 (€10.74) monthly fee for a programme guide? However, by offering features not found on other PVRs such as home networking, TiVo expects to exceed 10 million subscribers by 2008 – though figures stood at just 1.6 million at the beginning of May this year.
TiVo’s home networking, now a free add-on, allows subscribers to use their television to display photographs, and to stream music to their stereo systems. The feature works on wired and wireless networks by connecting a network adapter to the USB port on the TiVo Series 2 box.
TiVo have also announced that they are working to expand this functionality so that films and music downloaded to a PC from the internet, can be played back on televisions and stereos.
Nikon have just partnered with TiVo to showcase professional photography on subscribers’ televisions through Nikon’s Legends Behind the Lens promotion. Also, purchasers of some CoolPix digital cameras will be able to use PictureProject software to upload images to their TiVo box.
Apple have just released AirPort Express – a wireless adapter that lets Mac and PC users set up an instant 802.11g network at home.
The seven ounce box fits into the palm of your hand and is essentially a 802.11g transceiver with an audio out connection on it – plug your stereo into it, and it’ll play music streamed to it from your iTunes-equipped PC or Macintosh. AirTunes even has a feature to select which AirPort Express adaptor receives music.
The unit also contains a mains adapter so it can be plugged directly into the mains without any further cables.
You can do all the usual things with AirPort Express too – share your internet connection and printers, and the unit has a built in USB port and network socket.
AirPort Express costs US$129 (€105), which might seem a little on the pricey side for a 802.11g transceiver with only one network port on it, but then this one is based around being easy to use, acts as a repeater, contains the AirTunes circuitry and has Apple’s usual lovely stylings. Home wireless kit is currently very ugly and is not as straightforward to set up as some manufacturers would have you believe. With AirPort’s design heritage and simplification of the wireless networking concept, if anyone can get 802.11g to go mainstream, it’s Apple. Promoting the unit to PCs users is a great idea, as Apple no doubt learned from making the iPod PC-compatible. Apple’s Airport Express
One of the leading manufacturers of video cards, Nvidia, has stated that it expects worldwide shipments of media centres – PCs used to play video, music and games in a living room environment – to treble in 2004. This would take global figures to around six million units.
Huang Jeh-hsun, president and CEO of Nvidia made the statement at Computex 2004, saying that demand was picking up, and further growth was expected as prices fell.
Most media centres are still based around a PC paradigm – and many home users find PC concepts and interfaces off-putting. Operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Centre Edition are a step in the right direction but are still daunting for casual users, and it’s frankly a pain to have to boot up your PC and navigate menus and settings just to watch K-PAX on DVD.
Nvidia’s optimism on increased shipments, however is no doubt inspired by their own range of products, principally their nStant Media platform. Currently a laptop-only solution, nStant Media allows users to use digital content without having to boot into an operating system – and consequently uses less power too.
We can look forward to yet another entrant to the growing portable media jukebox market – this time from Creative. The Zen Portable Multimedia Centre has a 3.8” TFT screen, 20gb hard drive and Windows Portable Media Centre installed.
The Portable Multimedia centre is compatible with Windows Media versions 7 to 9, will also play MP3 files and display JPG and TIFF images.
The unit can record video directly from a television tuner, as well as import files from Windows XP. Using Microsoft’s implementation of MPEG4 means that content providers will have full control over how movies are watched and stored with the device.
Creative are being tight-lipped about the unit’s battery life and weight, instead concentrating on it’s media playback and synchronisation features.