I recently took a look at Dell’s Idea Storm site. It’s a good concept. You log in to the site and post ideas. Other users can vote and comment on the posts.
While taking a look at Idea Storm, I ran across this article about Streaming Media to a TV.
In the future, I will happily buy the device the post describes (or the AppleTV for that matter.) I think that the current problem is that it is going to take a few more years before Streaming Media to a TV is really a practical choice.
The ugly things about any device like this are going to be the bandwidth and the support.
On the support side of things, there is probably less than 3% of the population that is going to be able to just set this up out of the box. No matter how Dell, Apple, or whomever color codes the labels, you are just asking for too much from the average user to get this thing setup. It’s not like all TV’s have the same jacks in the same places.
And then the device has to be hardwired to your network or setup for wireless. As there are still plenty of folks out there without wireless, how do you think those same folks will do when it comes to running CAT5 to the back of their TV’s?
And then there is the bandwidth issue. I have decent connection, but when I stream full screen video to my PC it generally looks like crap. It’s pixellated and hangs most of the time. How am I really gonna stream full HDVT content and have it look better? Streaming from around my home network would be good, but I still have to get that content from somewhere.
Just for fun, what percentage of US households have a properly setup Home Network that involves sharing files and not just an internet connection? I don’t see this number being greater than 5%.
All in all, I think that there is a ways to go before the PC-to-TV device becomes a real choice, but I look forward to buying one some day.
