The iPhone strikes me as the archetypal Apple product.

I don't know much more about the iPhone that I have read on Engadget. But it has three salient characteristics that are typical of recent Apple products:

1. It is a very cool device.
2. It is expensive compared to simlarly featured products.
3. It is hard to develop software for.

The last of these is probably the most important and is why this product is doomed to be at best a popular piece of hardware (diven by the first characteristic), not something that would "change everything."

In contrast, Microsoft's typical product is dull, but contains a development platform on which other people can and do create a plethora of aplpications. These third party applications are the strength of the best and most successful Microsoft products. Microsoft clearly recognizes this, as evidenced by Steve Ballmer's much mocked chant.

Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Xbox 360, Live, Office. These sucessful products are all platforms for development. Microsoft is at its core a company that creates and supports (e.g. Visual Studio) platforms for software development. It is not so successful when it strays from this. Other products may be good or even reasonably successful, e.g. the MS Keyboard, Streets and Trips (and of course some are just bad) but they clearly are not the lifeblood of the Company. There are of course exceptions like the tepid performance of PlaysForSure, but I am confident that my observation is generally correct.

There was an interesting discussion toward the end of the 1UpYours podcast this week about how the Unreal graphics engine (used in Gears of War for the Xbox 360) was being used for a number of upcoming Playstaion3 games.

On one hand this is quite consistent with my prediction that development for console games is really becoming platform independent: By using an engine that runs on multiple console platforms, games can more easily be ported between consoles. Therefore similar games are easily released on multiple consoles.

But on the other hand, the fact that Epic's Unreal engine appears to be the only engine gaining significant traction cuts against that argument.

One data point doesn't make a trend, so it will be interesting to see if other middleware for multiple consoles becomes used in the same way as the Unreal engine.

Ok, maybe not just like I said, but at least "consistent with what I said" :).

From GamesIndustry.biz via Xbox-Scene:

Microsoft is hoping to see more titles released simultaneously on the Xbox 360 and Vista platforms, according to Rick Wickham, director for the Windows Gaming business...

The initiative is just one of many designed to marry the two platforms, along with games that are playable across both formats and the adoption of Xbox Live features into PC gaming.

I had indicated before that 360 and Windows platforms becoming interconnected was going to happen and that it represents a huge opportunity for Microsoft, especially when combined with many other trends in the industry.

I have, therefore, a different objection to the proposed sale of the Illinois lottery. It carries over to other privatizations. It is that most contracts to sell an asset claimed by the government will need to come with conditions or promises that the government will not devalue the asset is sells. Illinois knows that its lottery will yield more upfront cash if it promises - and can be counted on to keep these promises for reputational or legal reasons - not to make the (private) lottery illegal after the sale. But this means that a sale of the lottery limits the ability of future, elected governments to do away with the lottery. The objection, then, is that revenue maximizing privatization locks in policies more than might be optimal.

I got to listen to another excellent 1Up Yours Podcast this weekend. This series features some of the most insightful commentary on the games industry that you will find anywhere combined with sophomoric sexual double entendre.

What caught my attention this week was the discussion of the effect of the huge PS2 install base (probably around 10 times the number of all next gen consoles combined) and its effect on the console market going forward.

This got me thinking about the future of the console market and to make several predictions:

1. The PS2 install base helps Sony now, but at the expense of the PS3 in later years;
2. The Wii's useful lifespan will be cut short by increases in consumer HDTV adoption;
3. Consoles are likely to be differentiated more by their features and less by the titles available exclusively for them (much like PCs);
4. They will become like PCs in that new generations of hardware will come more quickly than in the past; and
5. The PC games market will become the equivalent of another console console, albeit one with strong ties to the Xbox-- a good position for Microsoft.

Here's why:

After this holiday season, we now also know that demand for consoles is not demand inelastic, the more expensive a console is, the fewer units it will sell. I think both Sony and Microsoft underestimated supply elasticity for next gen consoles. I am convinced this is one of the big reasons that the Wii has done so well: it is only $250.

It is also obvious that the Playstation brand is quite strong because of the strength of the titles available for the PS1 and PS2 in the past. Unfortunately, for Sony, consumers can get a "Playstation" by buying a Playstation 2 for $130, rather than a Playstation 3 for $500. The result was that PS2 was the best selling console this past holiday season. PS3 sales were limited by supply, but there is no doubt that the continued availability of PS2 at a fraction of the cost of a PS3 significantly dilutes PS3 sales. The "Playstation brand" will not save the PS3, rather it may retard sales of the PS3.

Less robust PS3 sales mean fewer exclusives for PS3 and feed into the trend of making games available on all platforms-- in this case both Xbox 360 and PS3. As I have detailed previously, this means that consoles will compete more on features other than what games are available, e.g. motion controller, Live or built-in Blu Ray player.

The other reason Wii and PS2 did well is that for people without either a HDTV or a high speed internet cconnection, neither the PS3 nor the Xbox 360 is that compelling a purchase. The next gen is all about connectivity and high definition. Sony fans are right about one thing-- the PS2 and the Wii are much more competitors that are the PS3 and Wii. The PS3 and Wii are in the same market segment-- which is different that the segment populated by the 360 and PS3. That segment is still quite lucrative, but it will be less so as more people purchase HDTVs, have high speed internet connections and want to use them. These trends will make the Wii and PS2 much less attractive options in just a few years. This will force Nintendo to come out with a new Wii in less than five years time.

With features other than exclusives no longer driving console choice, I think we will start to see new products introduced faster than in years past. Hardware features will become more important and manufacturers will respond with hardware with improved feature sets.

This is likely to be harder on console manufacturers with their loss leading hardware than on consumers for several reasons: (i) manufacturers old market models may no work that well any more and new market models are likely to be speculative add ing significant risk to this product space; and (ii) backwards compatibiliy will be a large feature as it rescues what would otherwise be consumers' stranded investments in games.

What does the market I have described look like? That's right... the PC market... with plentiful and fast hardware iterations, titles running on all machines... etc.

The emphasis on "Games for Windows" as a platform will bring PCs closer to the console world. There are still diiferences of course: some games are better played on the console platform and some games are better played on the PC platform for reasons that have more to do with interfaces and players proximity to the screen than anything else. But, note that Xbox 360 controllers can now be used on a PC quite easily.

This trend, combined with Live Anywhere is likely to leave Microsoft in an excellent position five years from now.

I had a brief chance to try out the Canon HV10 camcorder at CES and generally thought the feel was acceptable.

 To the extent that what I really want is something that can fit in my pocket, shoots acceptable stills and has an acceptable feel (which I haven't decided yet), this would probably be my choice. CamcorderInfo.com has a very good review. The great thing about being at CES was that I could get the experience of holding the camera in a pretty time efficient way-- if I tried to investigate this at home, I would have had to track down a store that has the camera in stock and make a special trip there to try out the camera (over an hour). This took me only a couple of extra minutes at CES!

Note that I don't really care about having a hard drive or DVD as the media it records on. All my video gets transferred to my home server after it has been encoder using the Vegas Video MPEG encoder so a the faster transfer of a HD doesn't mean much as I'll be spending a fair amount of time encoding the video anyway and I can watch all my video on TVs connected to my home network, so I hardly ever burn DVDs anymore.

Just as I have slimmed down to only one device that I carry with me regularly (the PPC-6700) I would like to be able to do the same for trips where I hope to record memories. What leaves me in indecision (and with 5-year old technology) is the question of whether I should buy a DSLR and abandon the dream of a pocket sized camera/camcorder that I rely on for everything. If I buy a DSLR, I'd probably just resign myself to carrying a large bag, which could include a larger camcorder.

So ultimately the decision to purchase or not to purchase a new camcorder depends on how well that device would fit in with the other technology I own and that I aspire to own.

Since the purchase of my stable of Xbox 360's in 2005, I haven't played that many PC games. I think this can be explained by a few factors, which relate to the role of each device in our household:

First, because we use Xbox 360's as Media Center Extenders, we have four Xbox 360's-- one for each TV in the house. This means that there is always a free Xbox 360 in one of the common areas of the house. One never has to choose between playing a game or letting someone else watch TV.

Second, playing on the console is generally desirable when our young kids are up, because you can use an Xbox on the first floor while keeping an eye on the kids (or even with the kids watching). In contrast the PC that is best for gaming and has all the games installed is up in my office in the attic, quite isolated from the rest of the house.

Third, Xbox games, especially Xbox Live arcade, seem more conducive to the relatively short 30 minute blocks of free time I seem to have to invest in gaming. Gone are the days, when entire evenings could be spent on an interesting game-- except of course for Viva Pinata (which has embarrassingly kept me up until the wee hours of the morning on several occasions!)

I'd like the PC to enjoy a renaissance, and I'll be interested to see if it does, e.g. as kids get older and DirectX 10 games come out for the PC.

Ozymandias asks:

My question to you is what big features would you want to see out of Live in the future?

For those not conversant in the latest Microsoft product names, he is of course talking about a future iteration of Xbox Live-- the service that allows Xbox users to communicate and games with one another online, and which is coming to PCs and mobile devices in the near future.

The question prompted a few thoughts by me:

• Optional information on physical location (via GPS for mobile devices or by known addresses for fixed devices). You should be able to turn this off when you don't want your location to be known. There should be means for finding out who is near you and what they are doing.
• Ability to keep some significant amount of data in the cloud. Ideally, this would function something like logging on to a different PC on your domain in that all of your files, Outlook information, game saves and the like would all be available to you on whatever PC you happened to be using.
• In addition to data being kept in the cloud whole, virtual PCs could be kept in the cloud and downloaded to whatever PC you happened to be running.
• Video chat between different types of devices, including multiparty charts.
• Tools to identify and form groups of users and then to communicate with them to schedule games as a team. This could ultimately extent to other activities as well, e.g. meetups.

Many other suggestions (many interesting!) are made in the comments to Ozymandias's post.

Chris Lanier has two good posts on how to make Media Center a more widely adopted solution for home media consumption.

From the first:

Media Center PCs just cost too much for many people to consider.  For many people the deciding factor of getting a Media Center PC depends on whether or not they can justify upgrading their current PCs...

Without the addition of HD support the product will die, plain and simple.  For general acceptance of Media Center it had to come.  Now, let’s get OEMs to tackle the newest old problem ever, getting the cost down.

From the second:

As I’ve said before, one of the great things about Media Center is that there are so many ways to use the product. For the most part, you can decide how you wish to use it. Whether you want a PC in every room, or you want a PC in the Living Room with Extenders everywhere else, or a PC in your Office and Extenders everywhere else. You can decide what’s best for you, and to a point that is going to be a problem for Microsoft. Our part of the market already knows how they want to use the product, and those opinions are mixed. When Microsoft makes changes, this might put out part of the market that has already accepted the product, so this must be done very carefully.... Having said that, with how many new product divisions Microsoft seems to keep creating, why not focus on both sides of the market and create a new division to focus on the server aspect of Media Center.

I have thought a fair amount about what it would take to make Media Center better in ways that would make it more widely accepted and have some related thoughts. Five axioms are they key to understanding Media Center's role in the market.

First, price. Based on my conversation with Dell at CES, I would think we would be able to get nicely configured dual cablecard tuner media center PCs for less than $2,000. (They did not say that specifically, but that is my educated guess from the tenor of the conversation.) This is pricey when compared to paying $13/month for a Comcast HD DVR, but it isn't out of line when compared to what people will pay for a single flat screen TV, and the a/v equipment to go with it.

Second, Media Center works best as a dedicated device. To the extent that people can be persuaded to spend the money for a dedicated Media Center PC, their experience is bound to be much better than if the PC also doubles as the family PC that gets rebooted often, has lots of applications installed and may hang from time to time because of weird things that a user might be trying. Maybe under Vista we no longer need to worry about these things, but I'm not holding my breath.

Third, one of the great advantages of Media Center is the ability to expand functionality through third party software. Using Media Center 2005 I have the ability to watch video podcasts and ripped DVDs. Such functionality will be a long time in coming to any Tivo.

Fourth, another of the great strengths of Media Center is a great ability to handle multiroom scenarios. I know of no other system (although admittedly my knowledge of high-end proprietary systems is limited) that handles multiple TVs in multiple rooms as well as Media Center and the Xbox 360. You get access to all of your media and TV shows from multiple rooms and can set up new recordings from anywhere. The Xbox 360 operating as an extender brings the reliability and ease of use of a consumer electronics device to the user.

Fifth, for all of this to work reasonably well, good home networking is essential. In my experience this means Cat5 cabling. Maybe the new powerline networking or 802.11n wireless will work well going forward too, but right now nothing beats real wired Ethernet for reliability. This is not cheap, probably adding a cost of about $250/room on average for professionally installed in-wall wiring.

From these axioms we can draw some conclusions about where Media Center is likely to find success going forward:

1. Media Center is at home in high-end installations. As professional installers become more familiar with the IT skills necessary to use Media Center, its use in homes with high-end installations will be become much more widespread. The existence of dedicated second generation extenders and PC makers like Niveus will accelerate this trend.
2. Media Center is unlikely to be an economical replacement for a single Tivo or PVR supplied by a customer's cable company.
3. Media Center can be an economical and reliable alternative for people who have two or more HDTVs and want a capable system for viewing multiple types of digital media. Several factors can accelerate adoption by such people:
   • A user friendly media center server like the recently announced Windows Home Server.
   • More prevalent home networking-- either by more cable being run in peoples homes or more reliable powerline or wireless networking solutions.
   • More prevalent digital media other than TV and DVDs.  This relates to the third axiom above and deserves a future post of its own, but for now suffice it it say that Media Center is probably the best method of enjoying such digital media and the more of it out there, the greater the incentive to use the system that is the best method of accessing it.

This was a longer post an more ambitious post than I had intended to write, so I'll stop for now. I'm interested to know if others agree with my axioms and conclusions.

One of the items that caught my eye at CES this year was the new Samsung CLX-3160FN.

I am not really desperate for a new printer because I already have an HP LaserJet 3015 which is perfectly fine for most of my purposes, which include scanning documents for archiving and occasional printing and faxing. I have a very old Agfa 1212u scanner, which I use for occasional color scanning.

Nevertheless, it would be nice to have a device with several features that my current combination of devices lack

• All functions present in a single device
• A color laser printer
• A networked device for easy sharing when my PC is off

The Samsung CLX-3160FN appears to satisfy these requirements as well as a few others. (Note that the networked nature of this device isn't obvious but is discussed in its manual.) It has a relatively shallow footprint (not quite as shallow as my HP 3015, but acceptably small for my taste). The last thing I would want would be a behemoth-- like many printers I have seen with similar features. The price is also right with an MSRP of $599.

One feature I don't really care about is the ablity to print/scan things to from a USB connector on the front, into which can can be plugged memory cards, cameras and the like. Not having to fuss with things like this is the reason I keep all of my digital media on our home server!

What I don't know is anything about its real world performance. I'll be interested to see some reviews when they become available.

I was interested in seeing Bluetooth headphones at this year's CES. I am getting a little tired of dealing with untangling earbud cords to listen to audio from my PocketPC Phone and of dealing with the cord under my coat in the winter. So the idea of bluetooth headphones to eliminate this hassle has been kicking around in my mind for a while. ICES would be the perfect place (perhaps the only place) where I could really investigate a variety of such devices.

In fact, I finally found some bluetooth headphones that I just might buy: Bluetrek Stereo ST1 Bluetooth Headphones. (Although is not clear when they might be sold in the US, as opposed to Korea.) These avoid some of the issues that make other such headphones unattractive to me:

• They are flexible enough to lie flat in my briefcase. Many bluetooth headphones will fold up, but into a ball that isn't great for storing in a lot of places-- like a pocket.
• They connecting rubber/plastic is rigid enough that the headphones won't be tangled up. Other bluetooth headphones have a thin wire that connects the two earpieces. I suspect that these would get just as tangled up as my current (free earbuds).

One potential downside to any bluetooth headphones in my mind-- the annoyance of charging them (both in hassle and the need to have yet another power adapter lying around) might exceed the convenience.

Nevertheless, I was pleased to see that this is the first year that any significant number of A2DP stereo headphones.

Since Apple's press conference, Apple TV has received respectful coverage even as the product pale innovation compared with the perhaps prematurely named iPhone.

Meanwhile, Vista Media Center gets almost no attention aside from references to the fact that CableCard hardware will finally be available at the end of January.

What's missing is any discussion of the potentially revolutionary effect of Vista Media Center to host applications written in the new Media Center Markup Language (MCML) and have them run on Xbox360's and other new media center extenders. 

Why is this revolutionary? Because for the first time people will be able to run all types of applications on Media Center Extenders. The capabilities of MCML applications far exceed what was possible under XP Media Center with its hosted HTML applications. The MCML applications need not even be installed on a Media Center PC, instead they can run from a site on the Internet. That means no longer would applications need to be updated on the users PC, they could simply be updated wherever on the Internet they were hosted. This provides power and flexibility in getting applications to users PCs that far exceeds any of the other set top boxes out there.

A theme of this years CES was trying to get Internet content into people's living rooms, i.e. onto their TV. AppleTV is an obvious attempt to do this, as is the new DLink Media Lounge. But because these approaches are centered on the set top box rather than a PC with accessible development tools, they are quite limited. In contrast Vista Media Center potentially brings all of the strengths of PC development (e.g. a plethora of solutions being offered to the market) to bear in getting Internet content onto your TV. I have seen no other solution that is even close.

The one thing holding Media Center back in my view is the lack of a simple, stable Media Center Server that doesn't also try to be a PC. Perhaps with Vista Media Center this won't be as big an issue, but without this you face the issues like a PC user of a media center PC having to reboot the PC and bringing down the extender sessions. I love our current home system: a dedicated Media Center box (cost: about $1200 for 2 SD and 2 HD tuners) in a basement room, with four Xbox 360s elsewhere in the house. You get the reliability of a consumer electronics device in the Xbox 360 and the flexibility, power and centralized management of a PC-- all for the cost of less than 3 HD Tivos.

This will only get better with the inevitable explosion of MCML applications for Vista Media Center. Why is no one writing about the potential this has?

I'm back from CES after a grueling day of trying to see about 1.2 million square feet of show floor in a little under 10 hours. Because I have a non-tech related vocation, I was only able to spend one day (Monday) at CES on the show floor. So I had to resort to almost constant movement, picking up literature on items that caught my eye and asking questions about products that really piqued my interest-- questions that led to yesterday's posts.

I only picked up information on things that interested me personally and made no attempt to see products like the 10 zillion TVs that were everywhere (although I did permit myself some amusement at at the competition among manufacturers to make the biggest flat screen TVs. BTW, who buys these things and how many of them do they buy anyway?

The result was that there were some cool items that caught my eye, but mostly I focused on blue tooth headphones, Media Center PCs and Xbox 360 (esp. using products on it as a Media Center Extender). As I make my way through the many pounds of brochures I collected over the next few weeks I'll try to post on all of these.

Chris Lanier, Paul Thurrot, Engadget and Inside Microsoft all have a lot of detail on this CES-announced product. Just a couple of items to add based on my observation of it in action today:

• You will be able to use remote desktop to get access to the other PCs on your home network from outside the network. It was not clear whether these had to be Vista PCs or not, but there was no indication that they would need to be running Windows Vista.
• It is hard to believe that non-Xbox 360's would not have access to the contents of this server through the Media Center PC that their sessions run on. If the Media Center PC can access material on the server so can the extender. It is possible that there might be some impediments to this (just as there are to Media Extender sessions accessing media files on a domain), but I can't believe it would be impossible.

My first reaction to Home Server was be be annoyed that it did not have more robust capabilities. I run Windows Small Business Server 2003 in our home and was hoping that it might have some more of that product's functionality built in to it. But upon reflection, I think that Home Server is a good (and necessary) first step in the home server market. Even though it won't replace my SBS 2003 box, I can see it being an excellent replacement for the NAS boxes that many people are turning to.

And with this being a Microsoft product it is likely that we'll see many new features in the years to come, just like with the Media Center OS.

 In addition to the information that Ian Dixon and Robert McLaws posted on the renaming of the OCUR cable card boxes to Digital Cable Tuners, I got some information on availability of CableCard on PCs other than Niveus at the Vista Consumer Launch in talking to Dell at their CES booth:

• At a minimum both Dell and HP will have CableCard PCs available for purchase at the Vista launch. Note that HP's floor reps did not provide this information and didn't really know what CableCard was. The information came from the Dell technology officer who provided information both on the Dell lineup and noted that HP had a CableCard PC on the show floor.
• Dell's initial CableCard offerings will initially be available only as part of a larger package, although our conversation was a little unclear on this point.
• By the end of Q1 2007 Dell thought they would be in a position to offer less expensive "a la carte" cablecard enabled media center PCs. By "a la carte" I believe he meant without speakers, monitor, etc., rather than the cablecard tuner without the PC.
• Cablecard PCs will require video cards with protected HDMI out connections. The lack of such cards is one reason why there isn't more selection in CableCard PCs at the Vists launch.
• The BIOS in the PCs that will run with CableCard tuners check to make sure there is an HDMI video card that is part of the PC.
• In talking to another manufacturer at the show (actually their Intel rep), they indicated that Niveus was the only "non-billion dollar manufacturer" to offer CableCard at the Vista launch.

All in all, I think this is pretty good news. This is the first confirmation I had seen that anyone other than Niveus would be offering CableCard at the Vista launch. These PCs should be relatively affordable by the end of Q1. While I'd prefer more affordable units at launch. Another two months doesn't seem like it is too long to wait, especially because any remaining kinks in CableCard may get worked out over those two months.

I also came away from my discussion thinking much better of Dell than I had in while...

• The service will be offered in the US thorugh AT&T's lightspeed, which provides 35Mbps in bandwidth to the home. So AT&T would replace your local cable company and ISP.
• This bandwidth should be enough for 2 HD channels and 2 SD channels to be viewed simultaneously. The service will be comparable to existing cable offerings, only the provider will be AT&T.
• Availablity will be determined by AT&T's buildout of infratructure up to the last mile (The last mile will remain copper.).
• The service will be available with a regular set top box that is not an Xbox 360. However, with an Xbox 360 you get some nice features like the ability to access Xbox live (e.g. chat, accept game invitations) while wathing TV.
• For homes with an existing home network, your router will need to be replaced with a router that has special QOS (qulaity of service) features that enable the system to work well.

This system has some advantages, the Xbox integration sounds cool and more competition for local cable coimpanies strikes me as a good thing. Similarly, there is no reason this infrastructure couldn't provide more a la carte offerings in the future.

But right now as a cable subscriber, I'm not that excited about the possibility of IPTV from AT&T unless the price were lower than my current cable provider, Comcast.

One big downside to this approach for me personally would be the inability to use a PVR with this system-- at least to the extent that I wanted to use the Xbox as the IPTV receiver. There was no discussion of using a Media Center PC to receive multiple IPTV streams and then record or distribute them to Xbox 360 extenders. I suppose you could use a non-IPTV set top box and hook it up to Media Center just as you can other set top boxes, but that would obviate any advantage of this system over Cable TV.

Update: Major Nelson's podcast has an interview one of the IP TV guys. Two takeaways: (i) what you can do will be dictated by ISP offering this service, MS is just providing technology to them; (ii) there was discussion of using the Xbox 360 HD to record shows, but the details of what you can do will be up to the ISP.

The emergence of the VCR and then the DVD unbundled video content. You no longer were stuck with the bundle provided by your cable company. We are now right at the edge of unbundling in even a bigger way. This is about both content and devices.

As to content, YouTube is clearly the early wave on this, though putting to one-side copyright violations, the real question will be how much amateur content people want to watch on their TVs. More interesting perhaps is The Venice Project, a new effort at building a p2p platform for distributing professional TV.

On the device side, there is a bunch of work to do. The Journal article quotes a Forrester Research study that says that 80% of those surveyed aren’t interested at any price in a device for moving content from their PCs to their TVs.

I think thinking about the differences between "TVs" and "Displays" is an interesting way to illustrate some of the issues and ultimately answer this question. Although there are not meaningful techincal distinctions between TVs and displays, the main difference is one of use: displays are connected to PCs, whereas TVs are, and are connected to, consumer electronics devices. This is why TVs are found in the "living room" and displays are found in the home office. Thinking about the difference between the two is helpful in understanding the real obstacles to getting internet content onto TVs.

The simplistic answer to the question of how we get internet content on to our TVs is that we just hook up PCs to the TVs. While that is possible, the vast majority of people do not want to sacrifice the ease of the consumer electronics experience (TV, DVDs, game consoles) for the unreliability, complexity and flexibility of the PC experience.

So the question for device manufacturers is how to deliver internet content to TVs in a way that is much more like a consumer electronics device.

Microsoft has done the best job of anyone at this so far, with the combination of Media Center PC and Xbox 360s as extenders. This solution was good enough for our home, but it is stil fraught with bad compromises: a need to reboot the Media Center PC acting as a server from time to time for various reasons; inability to easily play streamed internet video; complexity of playing downloaded internet video. Note that these aren't (just) software issues or interface issues, but rather issues that relate to the architecture of the entire system.

None of these problems is insoluble, but they will actually need to be solved before people are interested in consuming internet content in the same way as they do TV.

Content providers have good reason to want these problems solved. Delivery of content by conventional consumer electronics means (cable TV, DVDs, CDs) is all bereft of meaningful copy protection. Once the problems identofoed above are solved, and available bandwidth to the home increases to the point that multiple HD on demand streams are possible, then content providers can once again get control of their content: its hard to skip commericials in, or copy, streamed video.