Content area
Full Text
Intel wants its new home entertainment platform at the center of home A/V
Bill Davidson wants the Intel brand name to he just as synonymous with the living room as it is for the computer, but he knows it isn't going to be easy. "It's a struggle in this digital home space," he says. "[Resellers] are saying, 'Gosh, my people need a stable entertainment platform. Why would I want to put PC in to that?'"
Davidson is Intel's digital home channel manager, heading a division that works with resellers and retailers and promotes Intel technology that goes beyond the desktop PC. Since January, he has been charged with spreading the word about Viiv (pronounced "five"), Intel's latest technology to take on the home CE market.
It's a tall order. Many companies from the PC industry have tried to break into traditional consumer electronics, with less than stellar results. From Microsoft's Ultimate TV platform to Gateways flat panel TV line, it's been a tough nut to crack. Even Intel has had its share of rocky starts, from a briefly available line of Intel branded portable electronics and an abandoned attempt at making LCOS chipsets. Then again, it's not impossible. Before 2002, few would have thought that Apple would become the number one name in portable audio.
Viiv isn't a product, at least not in its own right. It is a platform, rather, based on a number of Intel technologies, including the company's dual-core 64-bit processor, a range of express chipsets and the Windows XP Media Center Edition operating system. The integration of these "parts" combines to act as a home entertainment platlorm with features such as HDTV support, an instant on/off function that puts the Viiv devices to sleep (as opposed to shutting down and booting back up) and 7.1 channel audio. Theoretically, Viiv works as a clearing house for entertainment services so that, when combined with other Viiv-compatible products, content can he streamed around a home network.
But Viiv isn't quite ready to deliver all these functions quite yet. An update known as Version 1.5 needs to be released to enable two important fuctions: hub connect technology, which helps to network the system to other devices, and Intel Media Server, an application that...