PC = TV = Mixmaster?
Does your television want to
be a computer? Does your computer want to be a VCR? Does your Mixmaster want to
be a telephone? The moguls who control the computer, television, and telephone
businesses think so, and they are populating your future with Internet
appliances . Already on sale are such I-appliance devices as Web-aware
televisions and e-mail telephones, which offer quick and easy Internet access
for consumers who fear personal computers. These appliances are as simple to
run as a microwave or a toaster oven. Just plug them in, and before you know
it, you're reading your favorite online magazines, ordering Puff Daddy &
the Family concert tickets, and composing e-mail from the comfort of your
Naugahyde couch.
TV and
telephone manufacturers are nuts about I-appliances because they view them as a
way to sell new boxes to a world supersaturated with phones and televisions:
More U.S. homes have a television (96 percent) than have phone service. The
computer industry sees I-appliances as a way to sell chip and software packages
to what they consider an under-PCed world. Only 40 percent of U.S. households
own a PC, and two-thirds of all new PC purchases are made by folks who already
own one.
The vision of a computer/television/telephone thingamajig
dates back to early episodes of The Jetsons , if not before.
Techno-utopian George Gilder foresaw the convergence of all these
electronic boxes into one back in his 1990 book, Life After Television ,
proposing a simple yet powerful "teleputer" device. Gilder was right about
convergence, but as we'll see, he was also wrong.
Among the
first entries in the I-appliance market is WebTV , a $300
box-and-keyboard combination built by Sony and Phillips. WebTV hooks your
television into your telephone line to provide access to the Web. (Full
disclosure: I work for the Great Satan that is behind WebTV.) Think of WebTV as
a whip-smart version of the set-top box you rent from your cable-TV
provider. What's smart about WebTV compared with a set-top box? WebTVs are
essentially tiny, simple computers. The new model boasts a 1.1-gigabyte hard
drive and a 56,600 bits-per-second modem, comparable to what you'd find in a
low-end laptop. The cable company's set-top boxes, which couldn't calculate the
cube root of 8 if you gave them a hint, merely decode TV signals from the cable
people. A unit of Oracle Corp. has developed a similar Web-aware product called
Enhanced TV . Sun Microsystems, which recently bought I-appliance
designer Diba Inc., is also developing a competing set-top standard of its own,
OpenTV .
Web-aware televisions are fantastic because
they're cheap and they work. But they also suck because they're slow and their
graphics are worse than what you find on a PC monitor. Only 100,000 WebTVs have
been sold so far, but that number is sure to rise: WebTV vendor Phillips is
peddling the machine door-to-door, Fuller Brush-style. Salesmen will visit your
home, plug you in, and explain all the machine's wonders to you.
Another
even simpler I-appliance is the EP-200 e-mail telephone by Uniden. This
device merges a Caller ID-ready, 900 MHz cordless phone with e-mail and
calendar systems. A tad pricier at $399 than WebTV, the EP-200 is fun for the
whole family, allowing multiple users to receive and send e-mail (the Internet
connection costs $4.95 a month). Uniden and others promise Web browsing on
future e-mail telephones. Also flooding the market are cellular phones that
send and receive e-mail.
Not content with being your spreadsheet program, word
processor, Web device, game machine, and recipe keeper, PCs want to be your
home entertainment center , too. A variety of manufacturers build PCs
that connect you to the Web, display TV broadcasts, play music CDs, and screen
DVD movies. PC maker Gateway 2000 bills the Destination Digital Media Computer
as an audio/video monster that engulfs you in a "wall of sound" as you play
Doom on a 31-inch monitor with a "screaming 300 MHz Intel Pentium II
processor." (Gateway hasn't attached a phone to it. Yet.)
The PC
industry may believe in convergence, but the broadcasters don't. Broadcasters
like their televisions dumb, mostly because they're afraid that the PC industry
will steal their business if computers and televisions merge. (They're probably
right.) So, the two groups have gone to war over the technical standards for
the next TV technology, digital TV . All you need to know about the
digital TV standard proposed by the computer people is that it's more flexible
and powerful and offers better resolution (and is much more computer-friendly)
than the current standard of analog TV or the digital standard pitched by
broadcasters.
Cable company spinoff WorldGate also
wants your television to stay as dumb as an eggbeater, because it's found a way
to offer cheap Internet access through existing cable boxes. The cost is $4.95
a month (keyboard rental will set you back an additional $1.95). Question: How
can something as stupid as a set-top box connect to the Internet? Answer:
WorldGate keeps all the brains back at the office. Its computers recognize
Web-page requests from set-top boxes and then ship the pages back to the
requesting televisions in a compact, single image (a "bitmap"). (The WorldGate
system depends on the vertical blanking interval, an unused part of each TV
channel, to send the bitmap. Click for a tidy explanation of the vertical
blanking interval.) Critics say WorldGate's computers will choke when thousands
of surfers start demanding Web pages. Webhead says don't underestimate the
cable companies, who have such enormous bandwidth at their disposal that they
can do anything (see my piece on bandwidth).
Will your
Mixmaster ever fulfill its career ambition to become an I-appliance?
Shuman's Second Law of Computational Dynamics suggests so. This law
states that wherever computer chips go, the Internet will follow: Everything
that's powered by electricity will eventually become studded with computer
chips. And as these dumb devices become smarter, manufacturers will explore
ways to make them more useful--that is, smarter still, which means connecting
them to the Internet so they can share their wisdom with other devices. Take
the example of the Internet-enabled car, currently a pipe dream. The modern
automobile is laden with microchips, which control fuel intake, cruise control,
anti-lock brakes, and more. It's only a short step from where we are now to the
Network Vehicle , being developed by Netscape, Sun, Delco, and IBM. It
will be "outfitted with voice recognition, transparent displays, global
positioning systems, and Internet access." The Network Vehicle designers left
car phones off the list, I guess, because they assume that car phones are
practically standard equipment today.
The take-home lesson of this edition of Webhead is that all
electronic devices are converging at a wicked rate. But they're also diverging.
Our powerful, multipurpose computers will continue to become even more
powerful, but as they acquire new skills--like voice recognition--their appeal
will be limited by their price. Meanwhile their simpler brethren, assigned
specific and narrow tasks (look for Internet-aware watches, biomedical
monitors, and security devices), will occupy the price niche of clock radios
and bread makers. In the future, the way to tell a real computer from an
I-appliance will be that you tell a real computer what to do and when to
do it whereas an I-appliance will tell you what to do and when to do
it.
