herding appliances

By anders pearson 21 Jun 2001

i’m thinking that home theatre and stereo systems could stand to have a few improvements.

whenever i go home i have to watch in pain as my dad tries to remember how to get the DVD player working. First, you have to switch the TV to channel 3, turn on the VCR and put it on channel ‘AUX’, turn on the receiver and switch it to ‘DVD/MD’, then turn on the DVD player, put in a disk and press ‘play’. this involves switching remotes 3 or 4 times and usually includes lots of swearing. my dad’s a smart guy, so the problem’s definately not that he isn’t bright enough to use consumer electronics; he’s certainly not alone. the whole process is just more than anyone should really have to go through to watch a movie. and if just playing a movie is that difficult, hooking up the whole system is damn near impossible.

here’s what i’m thinking:

first of all, we need all appliances to be bluetooth enabled (maybe not specifically bluetooth, but some similar kind of relatively universal wireless standard with a range of a 10 meters or so and enough bandwidth to carry an HDTV signal or two). no more wires to connect. second, the appliances should be aware of each other. the receiver would detect eg, that there’s a CD player, a VCR and a DVD player in the room with it. similarly, you could have a bluetooth remote that just detects whatever appliances are in the room and changes its interface to match them. having the appliances be wireless would also allow for more flexability. currently, a receiver can only handle and switch between so many input signals because there’s only so much room for connectors on the back of it. with a wireless interface, there’s no arbitrary limit to how many different appliances it could switch between.

this would allow for some further simplifications to the user interface. most people only do a few different things with an entertainment center and the system could predict the best behavior 90% of the time. if someone hits play on the DVD player, it probably means that they want to watch a movie, so the TV and reciever should select the DVD player as their input signal. there really shouldn’t be much more to it than that.

the whole idea of devices being aware of each other on the network is nothing real new. Sun’s been rambling on about this kind of thing for years pushing JINI. i’m just kind of surprised and frustrated that we haven’t seen any real results yet. it seems like anyone who could actually make an entertainment system easy to set up and easy to use for the non-technophile consumer could make a lot of money.