Thinkcorps

I love the fact that sooner or later, whatever you’ve been mulling over in your head seems to pop up in the blogosphere. There’s just so many conversations going on, whatever sparked your interest probably sparked someone else’s as well. This time, in honor of CES, it’s PC-TV.

Scoble comments on Doc’s comments on efforts to push PC through the TV.

I’ve been (obliquely) poking at this question after experimenting with Tivo, torrents and the Philips DVP642 (hyper-popular DVD player that plays Divx files).

First, whatever UI you want to slap on its face, you want a PC controlling your TV. It’s just too convenient and powerful. Tivo shows that.

Second, if you assume that podcasting will grow along with citizen’s media along with some form of Internet-delivered TV, then video creation will be democratized, and we are going to need to support the widest range of possible formats. Bittorrent demonstrates that there’s a plethora of combinations out there, and a PC is great at sorting through them. While my Philips DVD player is great, it cannot play all formats and often inexplicably stumbles over files it should play. My PC is amazingly flexible, and can be easily updated to play just about anything.

Third, (and this addresses the PC-TV interactivity argument directly) you must take into account the display. HDTV displays completely change the game and I think it’s extremely short-sighted to decide what the American public wants before it’s had a chance to figure it out for itself.

Historically, Americans have had to view PC-TV interactivity through an incredibly low-res display. Analog TV makes the PC totally un-fun (remember the Gateway media PCs on 36” TVs?). You can’t read anything from 2 feet away, let alone the couch. And the peripherals weren’t there either. The wireless keyboards and remotes sucked.

Now, add an HDTV which besides having vastly higher resolution also enjoys a larger physical display size than your average analog TV. Add bluetooth and more options for remote controls. Create a UI that actually works on TV. Now wait a few minutes (years) and let people figure out what it means for themselves.

We didn’t know we’d like/love timeshifting until Tivo gave it to us. Timeshifting is interactivity designed for the couch. What other couch-tuned interactivity could be out there? Don’t assume that interactivity means editing Excel spreadsheets in your livingroom. It doesn’t. There are dozens of totally new ideas waiting to be adopted into this new media PC platform. But you have to give it a chance to develop.

Of course, developing this new platform properly is the rub. The “digital home” is all the rage at this year’s CES, and within the announcements, we can see that many of that ancient “boom time” biz-dev execs have survived. There seems to be an instinctual drive by these execs to bundle up tight packages of hardware, software and (DRM’ed) content. They seem to believe that consumers will not buy devices that don’t come pre-packaged with content, and so they DRM their way into a corner, creating a device or service so crippled that only an idiot would buy it.

Here’s my advice: the media PC is an EMERGING platform. Like the Web, it needs freedom + time in order to grow. Build it so that it’s flexible and allows developers to easily add their own features. Build it so it can easily integrate citizen’s media in all its myriad formats.

Build it so that I can figure out on my own what I want to do with it. I don’t mean a completely empty platform. Just build it like you build PCs. Preinstall a few basic software packages on it, so I can get a taste right out of the box. Then leave me alone. Let me add whatever features I want, and keep that damn DRM out of my way.

You only don’t need a PC in your TV if you’re 100% happy with the Comcast/MPAA/Disney view of the world. Otherwise, there’s got to be a PC in your TV’s future.