The Last Ten Feet

For years, the recurring statement has been "the last mile," referring to when the faster fiber optic connection would reach the house directly as the slower copper cable bottlenecked home users bandwidth. In urban areas that has become less of an issue with offerings such as Fios. However, as many users have enough bandwidth to download DVD quality full length movies, the question becomes if they will do it. In my mind, it's the issue of the last ten feet.

These feet I'm referring to are the distance between the television set, and the computer. Let's face it, most of us want to watch our movies on our TV set, and not on our desktop. Sure, we've all watched a movie on a computer once in a while. I generally don't mind if I'm watching alone. But would I want to watch all my movies that way? Definitely not.

Where is this video coming from? There are several possibilities for watching movies on your computer. They include NetFlix with their new unlimited movie watching, and dedicated services like Vongo. However, both of these services keep the content on the computer as streamed media, so good luck on watching it on the TV set.

One way around this is the dedicated media center PC. With offerings such as this, at least there is now reason to justify the expense of such a device. However, in most cases, it won't pass what many call WAF- the wife acceptance factor. No, that desktop box is fine for the basement, but won't pass muster for the living room.

This is why there has been a slow but steady push to bridge this gap. Two products that attempt this are AppleTV and Sandisk's TakeTV. I can tell you about both in the nutshell. Apple's product is overpriced, both in hardware, and in rental fees. They're going to have to get their rental fees down so that they're significantly less than Blockbuster, and I can watch the flick for more than 24 hours. The TakeTV works well enough, but there is simply not enough content out there for it yet.

What we are left with to solve the problem are the devices that we keep hearing about. Which of these that will bridge these last ten feet is anyone's guess. Will it be a media center extender? Will the XBox get the job done? How about an Apple or Zune dock that can do HDTV quality? What about a dedicated NetFlix box? Perhaps all of the previous will only be transitional technologies as we progress to a networked TV. As more of our content to be viewed ends up online, this trend seems rather inevitable.

In the meantime, as we continue to watch our DVD's, and cheer Blu-Ray or HD DVD in the next generation disc battle, just realize that it's all about getting the internet hooked up to our television set. You know, that last ten feet.

Jonas