Digital Media Receivers and Consumer Electronics Integration
Although digital media receivers are often built using similar components to personal computers, they are often smaller, quieter and less costly than the full-featured computers adapted to multi-media entertainment.
In recent years, convergence devices for home entertainment including gaming systems, DVRs, Blu-Ray Players and dedicated devices like the Roku have also started managing local video, music, and/or streaming internet content. Likewise, some managed video services like Verizon's FiOS allow users to incorporate their photographs, video, and music from their personal computers to their FiOS set-top-box including DVRs. Gaming systems like the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation 3 and the Microsoft Xbox 360 support media management beyond their original gaming orientation.
As computing power increases and costs fall, traditional media devices like televisions have been given network capabilities. So-called Smart TVs from Sony, Samsung, and LG (to name a few) have models that allow owners to include some free or subscription media content available on the Internet. The rapid growth in the availability of online content, including music and video and games has also made it easier for consumers use these networked devices. Youtube, for instance, is a common plug-in available on most networked devices. Netflix has also struck deals with many consumer electronics makers to have their interface available for their streaming subscribers. This symbiotic relationship between Netflix and consumer electronics makers has helped propel Netflix to become the largest subscription video service in the U.S., using up to 20% of U.S. bandwidth at peak times.
Other digital media retailers like Apple, Amazon.com and Blockbuster have purchase and rental options for video and music on demand. Apple in particular has developed a tightly integrated device and content management ecosystem with their iTunes Store, personal computers, iOS devices, and the AppleTV digital media receiver. The most recent version of the AppleTV, at $99, has lost the hard-drive that was included in its predecessor and fully depends on either streaming internet content, or another computer on the home network for media.
Read more about this topic: Home Theater PC
Famous quotes containing the words media, consumer, electronics and/or integration:
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied ... but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“The more specific idea of evolution now reached is—a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dissipation of motion and integration of matter.”
—Herbert Spencer (1820–1903)