Home Theaters
Sunday, September 07, 2008
The context for this post: I spent three hours today (for a total of five altogether) hooking up my mother's TV, DVD player, amplifier, VCR, and cable. With that in mind...
Why don't they make things easy? You know what I want as a consumer? I want things to be simple, yet flexible. I want to make the decisions and yet have everything just work together. I want to not have five different remote controls and have to press six buttons to go from watching TV to watching a DVD. Is it that difficult?
I think part of the problem is one of control. The content providers (cable, dish, etc.) want to have control. They want to be able to charge you more for watching more than one television in your home, and that (according to them) requires them to put a device there, which needs its own remote. Then everyone assumes that they'll connect on their own to whatever TV/projector you have, which adds remotes. What if you have an amplifier/receiver? You know that'll have its own remote. See where I'm going with this? Everyone has partial control and each device needs its own remote.
My solution? Have everything connect into one device, have that device upsample to the highest possible rate, and feed that video into the screen and the audio into an amplifier. In fact, have devices that will check to see what signal they're getting and play whatever they receive in the highest quality way possible.
This would mean that life would be simple and less cluttered for the consumer... but does anybody care?
Why don't they make things easy? You know what I want as a consumer? I want things to be simple, yet flexible. I want to make the decisions and yet have everything just work together. I want to not have five different remote controls and have to press six buttons to go from watching TV to watching a DVD. Is it that difficult?
I think part of the problem is one of control. The content providers (cable, dish, etc.) want to have control. They want to be able to charge you more for watching more than one television in your home, and that (according to them) requires them to put a device there, which needs its own remote. Then everyone assumes that they'll connect on their own to whatever TV/projector you have, which adds remotes. What if you have an amplifier/receiver? You know that'll have its own remote. See where I'm going with this? Everyone has partial control and each device needs its own remote.
My solution? Have everything connect into one device, have that device upsample to the highest possible rate, and feed that video into the screen and the audio into an amplifier. In fact, have devices that will check to see what signal they're getting and play whatever they receive in the highest quality way possible.
This would mean that life would be simple and less cluttered for the consumer... but does anybody care?
posted by Burton at 5:18 PM
1 Comments:
HDMI makes life easier in that regard. Programmable remotes limit the need to fmultiple controllers yet are another expence. If you have all the same gear (I know snoy is good about it) then you can usually use your DVD remote to control your TV as well.
Easier just costs more. That why your mom has you around.
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