Over in Slate Farhad Manjoo is doing a series on the future of innovation and one of the things he touches on is the consumption of entertainment. He doesn’t, however, attack the subject from the angle of content delivery, instead focusing on the much more practical – and yet much less discussed – area of getting all the devices in our living rooms working together.
Even if computer companies win the living room, I doubt they are going to make our home theaters much smarter and easier to use. In fact, I bet the opposite will happen over the next five years: Apple, Google, Microsoft, and perhaps several tech startups will create a host of new software and hardware to bring amazing things to our living rooms. I have no expectation, though, that they’ll work well together. As a result, you’ll have multiple devices with overlapping functionality. New decade, new technology, same old problems.
Yes, we might have replaced our DVD players with TiVo’s and Apple TV’s, but we still need to wire the damn things (let’s not even get started on all the remotes). And, honestly, which creates more clutter in your apartment – your DVD collection or the tangled, ever-growing mess of wires around your TV?
Read the whole thing here.
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
