One, Two, Three, Four, Viiv, Once I Caught a Fish a Live!

It is quite possible that I shall never use my high capacity DVD drive to play movies because my PC is in my office and my TV is in the living room and I don’t see any reason to connect the one to the other. Neither do I see any need to have HDMI connectors on my PC displays as DVI works perfectly well, and I prefer to use 2.1 speakers rather than a surround sound system that has cables trailing all over the place.

My office PC is used for writing, e-mail, the Internet, games and music while the living room is for reading, TV, PS2, DVD, Hi-Fi and watching the fish swim round the aquarium. In short there’s no crossover, which is why I am completely baffled by Intel’s Viiv platform. I can see that Intel wants to repeat its success with Centrino by pulling the same trick with the desktop PC but I really don’t see that the two things are comparable. Centrino works because laptops are highly integrated computers that make compromises between screen size, processor power, weight, features and battery life. Conjuring up a processor, chipset and wireless chip that make the notebook better in almost every respect was a clever move that made Intel a fortune, and I take my hat off to them for that.

Viiv, by contrast, is a combination of chipset and dual core processor that suggests that your desktop PC can run Windows Media Center Edition to stream movies, play music, act as a games server and connect to your TV. There are some sectors of the market that can use a Media Center as a convergence device to cut down on the clutter. A student living in a rented room springs to mind, for instance, but my fundamental objection is that I don’t use the same chair to write reviews and to watch movies.

Indeed when The Sopranos Series Six came out last weekend I was happy to grab Episode One from the ether, burn it to DVD and walk the disc to the living room. I could have streamed the content from one part of the house to the other but really, what’s the point?

So Viiv’s not for me, but AMD Live! might be. AMD’s Henri Richard recently made a number of points on the subject in an interview with DigiTimes. Here are a couple of snippets:

“As you know, at AMD we took a very different approach to Intel on the subject, in the sense that we don't believe that the media-centre PC should be the centre of your living room and for reasons of space and noise, for instance, it doesn't need to be there.”

‘My personal experience is that as we move from an environment that was essentially analogue to the digital world, we're introducing a level of complexity that is not exactly what people want after a long day at work. You know, when they sit on their couch, they need to be able to push a button and have things work immediately, in a simple way, in an intuitive way. That's what's nice about analogue technology. There's an On/Off button, and it works. So I think we have to be extremely cautious about how we bring digital technology into everyday consumer life.”

AMD and Intel have no intention of becoming content providers but instead want to provide the plumbing that will pipe it around your house. Microsoft is desperate to act as the custodian of Internet TV and to ensure that no-one hijacks content from the BBC, CBS, Disney, Fox, Sony and Warner Bros, provided they use Microsoft products of course. The hysterical thing is that we punters are supposed to pay for the privilege of this nonsense while we are served up one hour TV shows that have 43 minutes of content, 17 minutes of advertising and wall-to-wall product placement.

That’s a fairly unpleasant scenario and it also seems to be the inevitable destination of this particular journey, so at least let me do it at a time of my choosing while I’m sat on a comfortable sofa.