Headline; “INTC invents tuner”.
Well maybe not yet, but by this time next year I'm sure a lot of people will think so as the INTC revisionist spinners do their thing. When I first heard that INTC was buying tuner technology I thought "My god they've gone and resurrected LCOS". But on further thought this probably has to do with platformization and INTC's moves into the Media Center markets.
One thing's for sure; if this Media Center stuff takes off it will rejuvenate the PC business like nothing else. Anything less than a dual core Opteron seems inadequate for the purpose, even with chips doing the codex work. This especially true if you want to record one program while watching another. This is probably why INTC is getting ready to rewrite the history of tuners. These things are going to be a big part of the Media Center PCs and having control ala Centrino and WiFi/WiMAX is a no brainer.
I've been talking, off and on, about the "PC in a closet" for at least 7 years now. The Media Center is about as close to that idea as anyone has come yet. As to whether it will prove out or turn into a product whose time has come and gone seems kind of undecided lately.
There are a lot of cheaper alternatives out there that will allow you to do TV time shifting(TIVO, cable/stelite boxes) and that doesn't include people like Google/Yahoo, that may end up offering the service for free.
Right now a dearth of software seems to be hindering a move to a PC based Media Center solution. While MCE05 is a notable improvement over previous releases, it's still pretty much a work in progress. For one it still denies cable/satellite HD reception although it does support ATSC. Also, MSFT in its' infinite wisdom has chosen a proprietary format for music storage that no one else can access (sounds like something INTC would have thought of?). Then there's the delay problems in switching from ME to using the PC as a regular computer.
Not exactly something I'd be too interested in right now, but unfortunately MCE05 is heads and shoulders above anything else out there.
Still, I remain convinced that sooner or later a computer is going to be at the heart of every home, handling everything the "PC in a closet" was supposed to and probably a lot more. Evidently INTC thinks so too.
AI
