On Tuesday I talked about the Xbox 360 and Apple TV, two very hot topics of conversation when it comes to spreading video and music onto your TV screen.
In fact media extenders are a hot topic in general. This year’s consumer electronics show in January was packed with new innovative products designed to meld your home network into one, making all the media in your house accessible on every PC and TV. Well at least that’s the idea.
Media extenders are potentially great enabling devices that can bring downloaded video to your TV set, but can media extenders make it in the mainstream market?
In order to make it mainstream media extenders need to be as common as Digital Video Recorders. Will this happen within the next few years? I doubt it and here’s why:
7 Reasons Media Extenders won’t appeal to the masses
- They are too complicated
To the technologically minded downloading video off the net and playing it on your TV through a media extender sounds great. However, for many its too complicated and troublesome.To play a DVD you only need to know how to stick a DVD in a DVD player, but if you use the media extender solution you need to learn how to download videos from the net, hook up a TV with a media extender, hook up a home network and play that video from your TV. For many that’s just too much.
- Lack of convergence
How many devices do we really need in our living room. Having to buy several pieces of equipment so you can watch TV is frustrating. - Video on Demand through the TV
If you can download videos direct to a box in your living room to watch it on a TV most people will be happy with that as it cuts out the PC entirely. TiVo with Amazon Unbox does it, the Xbox 360 does it and so will many more. - They can be expensive
If it costs $300 to own an Apple TV you could have bought over 20 DVDs or rented nearly 100. - People like to own solid media
There is always going to be a large proportion of people that like to own solid media so they can stick it on their DVD rack. I don’t do it, maybe you don’t do it, but I know plenty of people who won’t download any video because they want a genuine DVD to go on their DVD rack. - You can’t control your PC
One thing that people would like to do is to be able to surf the internet and watch online videos from their living room. This could be done by controlling your PC on your TV via a media extender, but there is not a quality device yet that can do this and do it well. - A media center PC is the better option
A media extender is a nice idea but are often full of lots of restrictions. You can only play certain file formats, the PC you want to play video from needs to be turned on, you can’t control your PC etc. The demographic that could use a media extender could just as well use a media center PC that allows you to do pretty much all you could want too.
In fact I expect the life of the media extender to be very short. Stay tuned for my next post to find out why …
