The Digital Living Room: The Future of Home Entertainment Is?
Iʼve Seen The Future And It Will Be…
By: MK
Joker bucks will rain down and litter the streets of Gotham, Androids will dream of electric sheep and Skynet will rule us all. Well maybe not, but in this edition of The Digital Living Room I will try and predict a few things that hopefully will make our home theaters more interesting in the years to come.
The Dominance of Blu-Ray (For a Few Years)
Blu-ray got off to a slow start but with big box retail stores offering some titles for as little as $10 bucks and players for $250 the format is taking off like Tony Stark after a cheeseburger and a bottle of scotch.
The Dark Knight sold 60,000 on launch day while total blu-ray sales quadrupled in 2008. Blu-Ray will eventually dominate the physical media market.
A Torrential Downpour
Blu-ray will succeed in the short run thanks in large part to the serious bandwidth limitations of our current web infrastructure. But really, what is the future of any physical media? I predict that digital downloads from services such as apple tv, Xbox 360 and several set top box devices that are hitting the market will eventually topple physical media as soon as 1080p content can be offered on demand.
The Obama administration has pledged to increase infrastructure and support net neutrality and has even appointed our nations first “Tech Czar”. In addition, I predict that movie studios will learn from the mistakes of the record industry and find a way to monetize peer to peer or bit torrents which would make the legal purchasing of HD content a breeze.
I Want My 3D TV!
The big talk at the Consumer Electronics Show this year was 3D Television. Dream works has announced that the studios films would be produced for 3D beginning this year and both NBA and NFL games have been successfully produced. Unfortunately the drawbacks to 3D are many.
While many households are still abandoning their old CRTʼs for widescreen LCD and Plasma, it might be hard to convince consumers to yet again upgrade their sets. Especially if that means special glasses to keep the viewer from getting a Bruce Banner sized headache. Since a different image is sent to each eye, the glasses act like a Dick Tracy decoder ring that allows the brain to make sense of the blurry images. Lastly, the viewing angle is greatly reduced meaning either a larger screen is required or only those sitting directly in front of the set will receive the set of images properly. As with all things, I predict that the technology will eventually be developed to solve these issues. For now, the futures so bright I got to wear shades.
